Leadership under Fire: How Governments Manage Crisis Communication

ABSTRACT

Crisis leadership is fundamental to preventing, preparing for, managing, and learning from crises. Despite leadership during crises being heavily reliant on communicative processes, the research record has predominantly reduced crisis communication leadership to managing organizations’ images. To contribute to limited knowledge on leadership communication during crises, we interviewed 24 U.S. government leaders and conducted a content analysis of U.S. government communication leadership during a major wildfire. We find that crisis communication leadership involves crisis perceptiveness, humility, flexibility, presence, and cooperation. We offer a message catalog of crisis response options for government leaders and show how leaders employed some of these messages in response to a large-scale wildfire. This study expands the state of the art in crisis communication leadership research with implications for theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• disasters
• leadership
• public health
• risk

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through Award Number 2012-ST-061-CS0001, Center for the Study of Terrorism and Behavior (CSTAB). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

Notes on contributors

Brooke Fisher Liu

Brooke Fisher Liu (PhD) is a professor of communication at the University of Maryland. Her research investigates how government messages, media, and interpersonal communication can motivate people to successfully respond to and recover from disasters. Dr. Liu’s research has been funded by agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She is the editor of the Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research.

Irina A. Iles

Irina A. Iles (PhD, MPH) is a behavioral scientist who studies health communication. Her research focuses on how people process health risk information, how they form judgements, and make health-related decisions. At the time this research was conducted, she was an affiliate researcher at START.

Emina Herovic

Emina Herovic (PhD) is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland (UMD). Her research focuses on the social implications of risk, crisis, disaster, and war. Prior to joining the UMD, she worked on projects focusing on building resilience to large scale catastrophes at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She has taught a variety of university classes both domestically and abroad including teaching at the University of Kentucky, Shanghai University, and Tianjin Foreign Studies University.