Exploring Organizational Resilience Asset and Its Antecedents for Effective Internal Crisis Communication

Nowadays crises are omnipresent with daily news headlines as reminders. The public continues to see or experience many different crises that affect numerous individuals and organizations as well as society in general. Against this backdrop, corporate communication professionals, for effective crisis management, are expected to help the organizations and their leaders make decisions, as well as communicate clearly when crises arise. Considering a fast changing media environment, recent scholars have called for new approaches to crisis communication to enhance theoretical developments. They suggested that researchers should take a broader context beyond the dominant crisis communication research perspectives based on the symbolic approach, which focuses on image or reputation management through strategic messages. In response to their clarion call for new crisis communication theory development, some researchers suggested resilient-oriented crisis communication, adopting the resilience concept (e.g., capacity to bounce back) and highlighting its role in the crisis communication, management and rebuilding processes. Nevertheless, there is ample room for further research to improve their efforts because there remains a lack of empirical evidence. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore effective internal crisis communication within the strategic management perspective, considering organizational resilience. By doings so, the study attempted to not only fill the research gaps regarding internal crisis communication but also respond to the calls for a new direction of theoretical development beyond symbolic approach. Considering the resilience concept, the results in this study provide meaningful insight into how organizational resilience can be measured by employees’ confidence and communicative actions for sensemaking and sensegiving, conceptualized as employee generated organizational resilience (EGORA). In addition, the results of the current study highlighted how internal communication factors such as two-way symmetrical communication and transparent communication can be used strategically to communicate with employees for the organization resilience. The results also revealed the important mediating role of between the resilience and its antecedents, demonstrating that organization-employee relationships (OER) is a strong underlying factor in constructing why strategic internal communication and leadership can exert an impact on organizational resilience.