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When the media report negatively about an organisation, its employees are not only affected but also a source of information for outsiders who want to find out more about the situation. Because of their credibility, employees can support public relations managers to preserve or restore organisational reputation. In this research, we explore the role of organisational identification and internal corporate communication (ICC) in the event of negative media coverage for employees’ defensive and assertive impression management behaviours. Defensive strategies include excuses, justifications and the avoidance of threatening situations. Assertive strategies are more active and refer to behaviours which aim to establish a desirable identity; in the context of negative media coverage, this entails actively defending the organisation, explaining the situation and conveying the organisation’s official version of the event in order to bolster its reputation. Results from an online survey among employed persons reveal that employees’ identification with their work organisation positively influences their assertive as well as defensive reactions. ICC has a more differentiated influence on employees’ reactions: If ICC is evaluated well, employees’ assertive reactions increase; if evaluated poorly, employees exhibit more defensive reactions. These findings show that ICC can make a difference in winning employees as ambassadors for the organisation in critical situations.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the challenges of health emergency communication as presented in the COVID-19-related research articles in the fields of organisational communication, strategic communication and public relations published between 2020 and mid-2022. A qualitative literature review consisting of two rounds of data selection and ATLAS.ti-assisted content analysis was conducted. The data include 67 articles published in quality journals of communication studies, with a focus on the abstract, results and discussion sections. The findings emphasise the need for emotional support, empathy and both vertical and horizontal informal communication in uncertainty reduction during a major health emergency. The limitations of the study include that the data are limited to the first published journal articles concerning the consequences of COVID-19 and that it comprises publications in communication studies but not related fields, such as health, psychology or management. However, it provides an overview of the research findings and offers guidelines for managers and communication professionals for the development of communication practices under the threat of a major health crisis. Moreover, it proves the importance of healthy and trustful workplace relationships as a prerequisite for coping with uncertainty. All in all, the study provides a good basis for further studies of organisational communication and health emergencies.

The Astroworld concert tragedy is used as an example of crisis (mis)management and the potential utility of the 4R model. Although the 4R model has been implemented in high-risk emergency management situations, it is useful in the PR field because of its actionable approach, creating a way for practitioners to prepare for and manage crisis situations.

This is an analysis of the crisis that occurred at Astroworld, spanning preparation, day-of events, casualties and enduring reputational impact. The paper applies the 4R method to the Astroworld tragedy to show how it could have lessened or even prevented the tragedy. Finally, the SCCT model is used to explain why the official post-crisis statements were ineffective.

Social media has heightened the importance of a quick and effective organizational response to risk and crisis situations because poor responses can go viral quickly. However, social media also provides intelligence and crowd sourced information that can inform PR practitioners of emerging crisis scenarios. It is also an underutilized tool for two-way communication during crises.

The 4R approach is beneficial to general practitioners as it simplifies crisis best-practices, something essential for quick action. As our world changes and becomes less predictable, practitioners must have a clear plan to protect their organizations and the public surrounding them. This approach includes reduction, readiness, response and recovery, which are all essential in crisis communication.

The 4R method has not been explored or applied in the PR field. This paper highlights how the model has been utilized in the emergency management field and illustrates the way 4R can serve the PR field.

The term strategic communication has become firmly established in recent years. The emergence of the term was associated with the hope of finding a more fitting description for overlapping communication processes, since existing approaches can hardly fulfill these expectations. To date, the research has been dominated by communication-focused and, in particular, organization-focused approaches that show little interest in the alternative perspective. An integrating perspective can overcome the wall that exists between the communication level and the organizational level.

The integrating communication and organizational theory framework is developed on the basis of Niklas Luhmann’s “Theory of Social Systems” (TSS), which can be attributed to the “Communication Constitutes Organization” (CCO) perspective. This perspective seems appropriate because its communication theory integrates the sender and addressee perspectives, and its extended organization theory can be used to describe in detail the organizational structures of strategic communication.

The communication theoretical framework states that one of the functions of strategic communication is to reduce complexity to a single follow-up option. From the sender’s perspective, strategic communication can be defined as an attempt to encourage acceptance of a follow-up option proposed out of self-interest. The organizational theory framework that both builds on this and is linked to it first shows the diversity of strategic organizational communications before explaining their formal and informal structures.

This paper is the first to offer a comprehensive framework that integrates concrete strategic communication activities as well as the (in)formal organizational structures that lead to their emergence. On the one hand, this enables a more differentiated description of all relevant aspects of communication theory (e.g. tonality, clarity vs. ambiguity and technical dissemination medium). On the other, the organizational theoretical framework offers a systematization that can be used to describe various formal and informal structures comparatively. Above all, this kind of inclusive, integrating framework is the prerequisite for research that relates the diverse concrete strategic communication activities to an organization’s formal and informal rules and thus understands them as (primarily) the result of organizational decisions.

This study, informed by the Situational Crisis Communication Theory, aims to suggest two primary response strategies that can be used for effective internal crisis communication during a pandemic situation, such as COVID-19. The effect of base response strategies on employees' perceptions of communication quality, leadership and relational outcomes were investigated.

An online survey of full-time employees in the United States was conducted.

The findings showed that for an instructing information strategy, not all types of information were equally associated with positive employee responses in terms of perceived quality of internal communication related to the COVID-19 pandemic and transformational leadership. Specific information that employees need to know in order to safely perform daily tasks, such as organizational protocols and thorough preparation, seem to be the most needed and desired information. Adjusting information was positively associated with employee perceptions of internal communication quality and perceptions of CEO leadership. Employees' perceived quality of internal communication affected by the base crisis response strategies were positively correlated with perceptions of transformational leadership and relational outcomes (i.e. employee trust in the organization, employee perceptions of the organization's commitment to relationships with employees, employee support for organizational decision-making related to COVID-19).

This study presents important theoretical and practical insights through an interdisciplinary approach that applies the theoretical framework and relationship-oriented outcomes of public relations to public health crisis situations.

Drawing on media richness theory and a framework of interpersonal communication goals, this study investigates how and why the IT industry's top managers use communication media to achieve their interaction goals in e-leadership.

A qualitative research approach is applied to understand top managers' communication media use and interaction goals. The empirical data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 33 top managers from large IT companies and analysed using theory-guided thematic and ideal-type analyses.

Top managers were categorized into three types, based on their communication goals through face-to-face communication. Relationship-oriented top managers pursued relational and communal goals, whereas task-oriented ones wished to achieve instrumental and communal goals. Task- and relationship-oriented top managers pursued relational, instrumental, and communal goals. This study indicates that communal, instrumental, relational, and self-presentational goals influence managers' communication media selection.

This study brings new knowledge to the management communication research field. It expands the framework of interpersonal communication goals by identifying communal goals as a new category, in addition to existing instrumental, relational and self-presentational goals. This study suggests that media richness theory could be advanced by recognizing that a broader set of communication goals – including communal, instrumental, relational, and self-presentational – influences managers' communication media selection.

There is growing scholarly interest in the use of penalty in employment contracts which reduce employees' pay if the employee's performance does not meet a pre-specified performance threshold. Prior accounting research has focused exclusively on the effect of penalty on employee performance. In this study, the authors extend earlier research by examining how penalty affects the employers' wage offers. Prior research suggests that employers' generous wage offers in employment contracts are normally translated as trust by employees who in turn reciprocate with higher effort. The authors present a theory that predicts penalty reduces employers' wage offers. Then, the authors propose unrestricted communication between employers and employees as a potential moderator for the negative effect of penalty on trust and reciprocity.

The authors implement a controlled lab experiment with a 2 × 3 experimental design (Penalty: Present and Absent; and Communication: None, One-Way and Two-Way).

The authors develop their predictions by utilizing insights from motivational-crowding and organizational communication theories. The authors hypothesize and find evidence that employers' ability to penalize employees can reduce employers' motivation to offer generous wages. As a result, reduced trust demotivates employees to provide high effort. However, the authors find that a two-way communication moderates the negative effect of penalties by restoring trust, thereby, increasing reciprocity. Finally, the authors find evidence that relationship-oriented messages explain the moderating effect of communication.

This study is subject to limitations inherent in all experimental studies. The decisions in the study experiment are less complex than those found in practice. Moreover, there are significantly higher costs and potential benefits to shirk on effort in practice. The authors encourage future research on other organizational features that would influence the generalizability of their theory and results. Nonetheless, this study makes an important contribution to the literature on trust, reciprocity, gift-exchange contracts, managerial controls and communication.

This paper has several important implications for theory and practice. The authors show that the presence of penalty may not automatically result in increasing employees' effort level, contrary to traditional economic theory predictions. This effect is driven mainly by the crowding out effect of a penalty on employers' desire to signal trust. Therefore, the presence of an open communication channel may become an important tool to reverse the psychological effect of reduced trust when penalty is present. Therefore, the study's findings contribute to the trust–reciprocity literature on how management control system influences employers' and employees' behavior. These findings are especially germane given the trend in the workplace toward establishing open communication at different levels within the firm hierarchy. The study also contributes to the literature on trust–reciprocity as critical informal controls and social norms in accounting practices (Bicchieri, 2006; Stevens, 2019), shedding light on how firms may influence employees' reciprocity in management control practices and induce them to act in line with the firm's objectives by opening communication channels.

Prior accounting research document that penalty in employment contracts increases employee performance due to loss aversion. The study, however, demonstrates that the positive effect of penalty is not sustained in a gift-exchange contract. Specifically, the study's experimental results provide evidence that the availability of penalties can psychologically change the way employers perceive their decisions on offering generous wages (i.e. trust) and consequently reduce employees' reciprocation of high effort levels. Yet, the authors propose a two-way communication as a restorative mechanism for the lost trust. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

The administration of a contract by the architect is necessary to ensure the contract is performed according to the conditions of the contract, compliance with related laws and the practices of the construction industry. With the increasing number of housing projects and the limited number of registered architects in the nation, the architect is unable to be hands-on with every project. Hence, the involvement of graduate architects to reduce the workload in building contract administration (BCA) is required. The purpose of this paper is to develop a BCA framework for graduate architects to enhance their work performance in BCA work and to assist them in moving a step closer to acquiring their professional qualifications.

This study adopted a qualitative method where seven housing projects in Malaysia were selected as case studies to conduct documentation reviews and semistructured interviews. The data collected was analyzed using content analysis to develop the BCA framework. Focus groups were used to validate the framework.

This study summarized there are 5 themes (claims and legal matters management, project management, communication and relationship management, quality assessment and management, and design management) and 11 sub-themes (authority matters, building certification, meetings, coordination checklist, letter-writing, contract documentation, building material, design brief, building sustainability and workmanship quality standard, contractor’s submission and building details) that need to be improved by graduate architects in BCA work.

The contribution of this study to the existing knowledge is the development of a BCA framework that enables graduate architects to get a glimpse of architectural professional practice in reality and better prepare them to confront and resolve problems. Besides, the proposed framework could be incorporated into a pedagogy focusing on methods to support construction contract administrators.

This chapter studies communication during a longitudinal crisis by exploring the Irish airline Ryanair’s use of Twitter (now X) in early 2022 when the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had already been affecting the airline industry for almost 2 years. It studies the airline’s approach to interacting with its passengers online and their reaction to its posts, at times, rather provocative posts. A corpus linguistic methodology is used to study tweets posted by and addressed to Ryanair between January and March 2022, a period that saw unprecedented peaks in COVID-19 infection numbers and the simultaneous lifting of travel restrictions. The analysis is based on the Ryanair 2022 Corpus which includes 27,089 tweets and more than half a million words. The findings of this case study show that Ryanair reappropriates instructing and adapting information on crisis-related topics as promotion and takes a political stance in its tweets to encourage consumer engagement. While the corporate tweets are successful in generating reactions online, the airline’s followers do not always perceive them in a positive manner. This case study makes an important contribution to crisis communication research as it shows how established communicative strategies, such as instructing and adapting information, may be reappropriated during a longitudinal crisis. At the same time, it demonstrates how these communicative strategies may – as a consequence – no longer be aligned with the core values of a legitimate organisation that is expected to act responsibly and ethically.

This study problematizes the prevailing normative and managerial-dominated view of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media from a power perspective. The aim is to provide a more nuanced and critical understanding of the negative aspects of this phenomenon.

The empirical material encompasses qualitative interviews with employees from 14 organizations and Foucault’s concept of disciplinary discursive power to analyze which and how discourses exert power over employee communication on social media and what role visibility plays in it.

This study indicates that employee ambassadors’ social media communication is governed by two discourses that create complex tensions, where ambassadors constantly must negotiate between self-branding requirements and an authenticity paradox. These tensions intensify through visibility on social media, where employees strategize and situationally silence their communication through self-monitoring and self-surveillance practices. Conclusively, the findings also outline the need for further critical research to offer a deeper understanding of power relations that influence the communication practices of organizational members.

The paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media and highlights disciplinary power relations that go beyond organizational borders.

The findings underscore that organizations need to address the critical aspects of self-initiated employee ambassadorship and act as facilitators to support employees in their navigation process.

This paper contributes a new critical power perspective on employee ambassadorship on social media.