Rachel Corry

Ms. Boudreau

ENC 2135

3 October 2017

Project 1 Literature Review

Focusing on life within the field of crisis management and the dynamics of

communication between people inside and outside of the field, I used a variety of sources to

form a solid understanding about these conversations. Most of the scholarly journals and articles

I read drew on studies including questionnaires, specific crises, application of different models,

and company ratings. The four books I used in my writing procedure were especially helpful in

providing context for the processes underlying crisis response work and the significance of

successful crisis management. The sources publications emphasize different components of

crisis communication and use diverse writing conventions, however, they all work together to

demonstrate the potential consequences and applications of crisis management implementation.

To address my initial research question of developing crisis responses according to

unique circumstances, I found information on leadership styles and guidelines for the creation of

crisis response plans. In their article Organizational Culture and Leadership Style, Bowers,

Hall, and Srinivasan describe four main crisis leadership outlooks and the need for a well-

qualified spokesperson. Although this scholarly article utilized a professional, field-specific

style, a helpful writing convention was the authors reevaluation of emergencies introduced in

the opening sentences after informing readers about differing crisis leadership approaches.

Similarly, in Crisis Management Practices and Approaches: Insights from Major Supply Chain

Crises, the authors explore the implications of strong leadership, collaboration, flexibility, and
innovative planning involved in strategy planning. This article is structured in a more

straightforward five-section style with a table of crisis case studies to draw examples from (like

Bowers, Hall, and Srinivasan also do in their publication). In Ongoing Crisis Communication,

Coombs takes a more general but systematic approach to the process of forming crisis

management strategies. He includes discussion questions following every chapter and multiple

tables about crisis communication key points, claiming the crisis management plan should be

meticulously crafted before a crisis occurs prescribing how and when to communicate during a

crisis (Coombs 107). I found Coombs publication to be most useful in synthesizing the

research I found in these three sources regarding the development of a crisis management plan,

largely by his concise conclusion sections.

Crisis management team intercommunication was another research question that guided

my secondary source exploration. Waller, Lei, and Prattens scholarly article "Focusing on

Teams in Crisis Management Education was the central source I used in determining the skills

CMT members should possess. It combines findings from the authors and studies in an elaborate

style and proposes the importance of a CMT member being up to date in their understanding of

a dynamic crisis situation, develop and use a transactive memory system, develop a sense of

team efficacy, and flexibly adapt team interaction (Waller, Lei, and Pratten 213). In his book,

Coombs covers more wide-ranging suggestions for CMT member training, such as familiarity

with social media, ability to make decisions under pressure, and dressing appropriately.

Regarding the investigation into how organizations crisis management behavior impacts

the way audiences view them, I learned that public approval during a crisis is a heavily discussed

and researched topic in my field. Bundy and Pfarrers extensive article in Academy of

Management Review explores the thought processes behind social approval of crisis responses,
which organizations should consider upon crisis management planning. A matched response

strategy is contrasted with a mismatched response strategy both graphically and textually,

demonstrating the matched response strategy that incorporates evaluators potential perceptions

is more likely to facilitate evaluators sense making and can normalize the loss to social

approval (Bundy and Pfarrer 355). To a more general audience than Bundy and Pfarrers article,

Seymour and Moores Effective Crisis Management uses familiar writing conventions like

subheadings, bold and italics, and bullet points to draw inferences on the audiences central role

in crisis response planning. The vital audiences always active in crisis communication are

analyzed, including employees, consumers, the business community, local community, and

politicians. Penrose brings in a new perspective focusing on how an organizations collective

expectations affect their dedication to planning and revising crisis management strategies instead

of emphasizing the role of public perceptions as Bundy and Pfarrer, Seymour and Moore do. In

"The Role of Perception in Crisis Planning," Penrose relies on the results from a questionnaire to

Fortune 500 industrial companies to provide evidence that organizations must strike a

compromise between their own crisis perceptions and what the situation requires. Masseys

academic journal connects all three of the previously mentioned sources within the context of

organizational legitimacy, or the extent to which the public perceives an organization as

reliable. He gradually moves from defining crisis management and organizational legitimacy to

more comprehensive research studies and arguments, eventually claiming that generalist

organizations are perceived as more legitimate than specialist ones and consistent crisis

response strategies are more effective (Massey 168). Organizations must consider their own

values and expectations as well as their audiences in constructing a crisis response plan to

maintain a positive public image.

 My final research question concerning the relation of crisis management to other fields

was particularly interesting to me. The article Keeping the Lights on and Skinner and

Mershams Disaster Management both attested to the broad scope of crisis management in many

areas of study and significance of crisis communication in any organization. Rasli, Haider, Fei

Goh, and Kowang Tan utilize a writing style and format like Skinner and Mersham; brief

checklists, summary sentences, and charts are employed to make the information in both sources

accessible to a wide audience of people inside and outside the field. In Effective Crisis

Communication, the authors denote the opportunity for improvement after a crisis through

learning from failure, vicarious learning, organizational memory, and unlearning (Ulmer,

Sellnow, and Seeger, 144-149) with conventions like sentence long lessons, images, and case

studies of emergencies like the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Veil takes this a step further by claiming

the Mindful Learning Model if barriers are overcome, can not only lessen the impact of a crisis

but also potentially prevent a crisis from occurring (142). Thus, these sources advocate that

crisis management offers organizations across many fields a chance to improve their images and

establish themselves as worthy of public trust.

Overall, these sources allowed me to become exposed to the publications and

conversations circulating in the field, furthering my research process on life and communication

within crisis management.