A comprehensive diagnosis of an organization's preparedness for a crisis requires an examination of its climate beyond the influences from the management. This study emphasizes the crucial role ...employees play in establishing and maintaining a climate that will survive crises by examining the function of promotive and prohibitive voice in fostering a culture of safety. The current study proposed a model in which employee promotive and prohibitive voices impact organizational crisis preparedness through the mediation of organizational safety culture. 329 working adults participated in the study through answering an online questionnaire on MTurk. The data were consistent with the proposed path model, demonstrating the critical role that employee voice plays in creating a culture of safety, which ultimately leaves an organization adequately or inadequately prepared for a potential crisis event.
This study took an intergroup communication approach and examined how two types of social identities, namely organizational identity and shared ethnic identity with the victim, affect publics’ ...reactions to a crisis. Data collected via a quasi‐experiment showed that organizational identity affects publics’ reactions, such that internal publics perceive the organization more positively and have less negative word‐of‐mouth intention. Internal publics feel guilty even if they are not personally responsible for the crisis. Publics do not react more negatively when their ethnic ingroup members are accidentally victimized. Organizations should mitigate the internal publics’ anger and guilt and also clarify that the crisis is nonethnicity‐related when the victims happen to be ethnic minorities to avoid any misunderstanding of victims’ ethnic ingroup members.
In 2008, as the financial crisis unfolded in the United States, the banking industry elevated its lobbying and campaign spending activities. By the end of 2008, and during 2009, the biggest political ...spenders, on average, received the largest bailout packages. Is that relationship causal? In this paper, I examine the effect of political connections on the allocation of funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to the US financial services industry during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. I find that TARP recipients that lobbied the government, donated to political campaigns, or whose top executives had direct connections to politics received better bailout deals. I estimate regression discontinuity design and instrumental variable models to uncover how election outcomes for politicians in close races affected the distribution of bailout funds for connected firms. The results do not imply that some banks were deliberately favored over others, just that favored banks benefited because of their proximity to the right people in power. If being politically connected matters in general, in times of crisis it matters even more.
Audience costs theory posits that domestic publics punish leaders for making an external threat and then backing down. One key mechanism driving this punishment involves the value the public places ...on consistency between their leaders' statements and actions. If true, this mechanism should operate not only when leaders fail to implement threats, but also when they fail to honor promises to stay out of a conflict. We use a survey experiment to examine domestic responses to the president's decision to "back down" from public threats and "back into" foreign conflicts. We find the president loses support in both cases, but suffers more for "backing out" than "backing in. " These differential consequences are partially explained by asymmetries in the public's treatment of new information. Our findings strongly suggest that concerns over consistency undergird audience costs theory and that punishment for inconsistency will be incurred, regardless of the leader's initial policy course.
Many of the assumptions that underpin mainstream macroeconomic models have been challenged as a result of the traumatic events of the recent financial crisis. Thus, until recently, it was widely ...agreed that although the stock of money had a role to play, in practice it could be ignored as long as we used short-term nominal interest rates as the instrument of policy because money and other credit markets would clear at the given policy rate. However, very early on in the financial crisis interest rates effectively hit zero percent and so central banks had to resort to a wholly new set of largely untested instruments to restore order, including quantitative easing and the purchase of toxic financial assets. This book brings together contributions from economists working in academia, financial markets and central banks to assess the effectiveness of these policy instruments and explore what lessons have so far been learned.
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a challenge to state capacities on all countries of the world and a genuine test of their abilities of opportunity management. In comparison, China has managed to ...promptly get the pandemic under effective control and firmly enhanced domestic support for the government. This article argues that China’s successful opportunity management was firmly shaped by its institutional settings, governing structures, and actor strategies. While the noncompetitive regime, unitary government, performance legitimacy, and high citizen trust afforded strong political commitment, China’s crisis management experiences and capacities facilitated quick and effective coordination. Further, top leaders made use of the crisis to demonstrate accountable leadership and push forward a grand reform agenda. The nature and functioning of these pro-success factors are inherently rooted in the unique Chinese context.
Points for practitioners
This study shows a successful story of opportunity management in crises in the Chinese context under the COVID-19 pandemic scenario. Political leaders and public managers should enable systematic and prompt governance responses to such major challenges by building up a broad political consensus and coordinating evidence-based emergency responses. The study shows that clear accountability in crises is a major factor determining the capability of a system to take decisive actions and should be seriously reconstructed by countries struck by the pandemic.
•Empathy determines stakeholder responses to crises and crisis communication.•Stakeholders’ empathy with the organization in crisis reduces reputational damage.•Empathy explains the impact of crisis ...types (victim vs. preventable) on reputation.•Corporate apologies repair reputation through an intermediate effect on empathy.
This study advances our theoretical knowledge of how organizational crises and crisis communication affect reputation. Prior research solely emphasizes the importance of organizational crisis responsibility in this process. Three experiments show that stakeholders’ empathy toward the organization provides a second explanation. The first two experiments demonstrate that victim crises not only inflict less reputational damage than preventable crises because stakeholders consider the organization less responsible for the events, but also because they are more likely to empathize with the company. The third study shows that empathy can also explain the outcomes of crisis communication. An apology arouses empathy among stakeholders and subsequently increases reputation repair, unlike denial. The role of empathy in the crisis communication process has implications for both theory and practice.
This research examines the crisis management approaches of local governments in responding to the service demands of their homeless populations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has ...generated challenges for cities in serving the homeless who often lack access to health care and may reside in outdoor camps or congregate shelters where the virus may spread. A review of the websites in 20 major U.S. cities shows that they are adopting a number of diverse and innovative crisis management strategies to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for their most vulnerable population. Information useful to practitioners and scholars is presented.
As urbanization and population growth continue to accelerate in China, maintaining public safety and crisis management has become increasingly complex. To address this issue, this research article ...proposes a new model for optimizing urban public safety governance and crisis management by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technology with a focus on sustainability. This study aims to explore the construction and path of an urban public safety governance and crisis management optimization model integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technology in China. We developed a linear regression model to examine the relationship between public safety technologies and outcomes, with public safety outcomes (PSO) as the dependent variable and public safety governance structure (PSGS), AI-driven data collection and analysis (AIDC&A), crisis prediction and early warning system (CPEWS), AI-assisted decision-making (AIADM), and public safety response mechanisms (PSRM) as independent variables. The model summary revealed that the independent variables accounted for a moderate proportion of the variance in public safety outcomes, with an R² value of 0.5 and an adjusted R² value of 0.45. The results supported the hypothesis that the integration of different public safety technologies has a positive impact on public safety outcomes. The effective governance structure, AI-driven data collection and analysis, crisis prediction and early warning system, AI-assisted decision-making, and efficient public safety response mechanisms were all found to be crucial for enhancing public safety outcomes. The proposed model was validated through a case study in a Chinese city, with feedback from stakeholders confirming its effectiveness. Overall, the findings suggest that the urban public safety governance and crisis management optimization model integrating AI technology can significantly improve public safety management in urban areas.
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