The rise of internal activism: motivations of employees’ responses to organizational crisis

ABSTRACT

Integrating relationship management theory and internal crisis communication literature, this study aimed to understand employees’ affective and behavioral responses toward their organization during an organizational crisis. Focusing on a crisis caused by allegations of gender discrimination practices in the workplace, the current study investigated how employees’ exchange–communal relationships lead to their negative affect, communication behaviors, and activism intentions. Results of an online survey with 401 full-time employees in the United States suggested that employees’ exchange relationship is positively associated with negative affective response, and communal relationship is positively associated with their active communication behaviors. Furthermore, negative affective response significantly increased employees’ active communication behaviors and activism intentions. Theoretical implications for public relations and internal crisis communication scholarship are provided.

KEYWORDS:

• Employee activism
• internal crisis communication
• communal-exchange relationship
• negative affect
• employees’ communication behaviors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although the term employee activism has been typically used in practice and research (e.g., Hirsch, 2021; Wingard, 2020), this study uses the term internal activism to denote situations in which both those who are active (i.e., the employees) and the target of their activism (i.e., the organization) are internal, as opposed to situations in which employees engage in activism toward an external target.

2. This study uses the term internal communication, which can be used interchangeably with employee communication (Kim & Rhee, 2011; Walden et al., 2017). Internal communication, as a core function of public relations, is used for managing employee relationships strategically (Lee & Yue, 2020).

3. In the current study, the term “activists” is conceptually different from “active publics.” Active publics are problem solvers who are more effortful in acquiring information about a problematic situation to solve the problem at an individual level, whereas activists tend to collectively solve a problem by actively sharing and forwarding information to others who share problem perceptions (Kim & Grunig, 2011). Internal activists here thus indicate internal members who collectively behave to solve their organizations’ issues or problems.

4. This study focused on individuals’ activism intentions, their readiness to participate in collective actions, rather than activism behavior. The theory of planned behavior (cf., Ajzen, 2002) has suggested that behavioral intentions can lead to individuals’ actual behaviors; thus, self-reported intentions have been used as proxies of actual behaviors in numerous studies (e.g., Chandon et al., 2005).

5. Given that gender discrimination reflects organizations’ managerial misconduct, a crisis caused by internal members’ allegations of discrimination acts against women can be considered as a “preventable” organizational crisis (cf., Coombs, 2007).

6. Given that the phenomena of employee activism largely emerged in big-sized companies such as Google and Wayfair (Bomey, 2019), this study focused on employees in large-sized companies with at least 500 employees.

7. There was substantial similarity between the U.S. population and the final sample of this study: The most-recent U.S. census data (The United States Census Bureau, 2019) showed that the U.S. population consisted of 49.2% male and 50.8% female. A majority were Caucasians (60.2%), followed by Hispanics/Latinos (18.5%), African Americans (13.1%) and Asian/Asian Americans (6.4%), and others (1.7%). The median age was 38.2.

8. This study used a fictitious scenario for two reasons. First, fictitious scenarios have often been used in public relations and crisis communication research as experimental stimuli to control individuals’ prior perceptions and attitudes toward an organization (e.g., DiStaso et al., 2015; Lee, 2019; Yang & Lim, 2009). Fictitious crisis vignettes are useful to generalize results to real crises (see, Ma & Zhan, 2016). Second, employees in the current study were recruited from different organizations in the United States. Thus, their experiences or observance of gender discrimination at work may vary, which was controlled in this study by providing a fictitious scenario.