Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management最新文献

In this study, we present a new four-phase crisis model and the development and assessment of a mobile crisis management application. The model development was supported by a participatory process involving Finnish Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). The four phases of the model are preparedness, beginning of the crisis, during the crisis, and after the crisis. The new model is incorporated into the mobile app to offer clear, actionable advice for different stages of crisis management. The mobile app, “Crisis Assistant”, is designed to aid SMEs in managing a variety of crises, including infectious diseases, accidents, cyber security threats, personnel issues, and business changes. Recognizing the unique vulnerabilities of SMEs due to their size and resource constraints, and their critical role in the economy, the app aims to provide accessible, user-friendly crisis management guidance. In the mobile app, web analytics provide real-time insights into the content usage, which allows for updates to the crisis guidance content and authorities' instructions as well as the further development of the app. The app has been well-received, highlighting the importance of mobile-based solutions in enhancing SME resilience and preparedness for crises. This study suggests future research should evaluate the app's broader impact on SME crisis management capabilities and applicability to other crisis domains.

Although studies have argued the relationship of anger expressions with the satisfaction of crisis response strategies in traditional studies, fewer studies had integrated large-scale user-generated social media data to characterize public's dynamic anger expressions in multiple crisis stages following different response strategies. Drawing on the Situational Crisis Communication Theory and text mining techniques, this study analyzed the anger expressions in Weibo posts using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC, 2015), and the statistical comparison results suggested that the number of anger words after the involved company conducted deny strategy was significantly larger than the number of anger words when diminish and rebuild strategies were applied. Furthermore, using Biterm Topic Model, we observed dynamic changes of anger-related posts' themes following different crisis response strategies. Our research serves as an impetus for authorities to systematically examine the manifestations of anger exhibited by individual users on social media platforms, thereby enabling an assessment of public sentiments pertaining to diverse strategies. This also empowers practitioners to enhance the precision and efficacy of crisis phase-specific responses within the domain of crisis communication.

This article is an example of “Lessons from the Field.” In early 2021, a call to action resulted in an unprecedented surge of volunteers for Utah's public health system. This call to action was in support of the rollout of COVID-19 vaccine across the state and the need to vaccinate the population as quickly and efficiently as possible. In this case study, we describe the events that preceded the surge of volunteers as well as challenges and resolutions to volunteer onboarding. Additionally, we discuss the importance of collaboration between local health departments and the Utah Department of Health and Human Services and describe how the partnership was strengthened by this specific emergency response.

Decision-making in emergency situations, such as those faced by fire, police, and health service personnel, presents unique challenges due to the high-stakes and time-pressured environment. Here we aim to better understand what emergency responders regard as constituting ‘good’ and ‘bad’ decisions in emergency situations. We administered a modified Delphi study, eliciting opinions from decision-makers across all these sectors towards consensus around the key elements of good and bad decision-making. Participants were first asked to define what makes a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ decision, and subsequently to identify the top five most important elements of each. While consensus was not found, important insights were identified that can assist improve the standard of decision making at all levels of emergency response and management. We observed (i) a lack of a common understanding between participants of what a decision is, and how a decision differs from pre-decision and postdecision components; (ii) responses varied according to whether a free text description or the identification of separate elements was requested; (iii) respondents valued ‘goodness’ across different and at times unrelated components a scaled measure of decision quality as opposed to a binary evaluation of ‘rightness’; and (iv) pre- and postdecision elements are considered more important than the decision itself when determining the quality of a decision. To address the issues highlighted by the study we recommend improvements in training, and improvements to organization doctrine related to decision making, risk tolerance, assessment of decision quality and development of intent-based or principle-based operational guidance. Ultimately, incident controllers from all services must remain cognizant that they will face considerable scrutiny if they cannot explain how they arrived at the decision they made.

How can crisis leadership be developed before an organisational crisis occurs? This article addresses this important question by reviewing three individual-level leadership perspectives (leader personality traits, leadership styles, and functional leadership) and three organisational level perspectives (leadership as contextual, leadership as collective, and leadership as dynamic), on how to develop crisis leadership with regard to recruitment, selection, and training. While crisis leadership is often perceived as something individual “leaders are born with” or as a variant of general leadership abilities, such an understanding leaves much to chance in terms of who will be effective leaders in a crisis, as well as the development of leadership capacity in organisations before a crisis actually occurs. This passive approach not only contradicts research on what constitutes effective crisis leadership but also is perceived to be unethical in terms of the potential consequences ineffective leadership can have in a crisis. This article provides an integrative overview of current and hitherto dispersed crisis leadership development research, showing how recruitment, selection and training to achieve collective crisis leadership capacity encompasses switching between organisational and individual level perspectives. We suggest implications for theory and future research as well as for practitioners responsible for developing crisis leadership in organisations.

While existing crisis management research primarily approaches crisis communication from a single-event perspective, this study provides initial evidence for communication about compound crises. To this purpose, we conducted a nationally representative survey experiment among U.S. residents (N = 670) to examine the effects of communication about compound crisis events on message fatigue and household preparedness. The study did not find support for the negative effects of communication about compound crises on message-induced crisis fatigue and household preparedness intention. An additional analysis revealed that effects of the messages about compound crisis events are contingent upon the participants' level of past crisis experience, past crisis preparedness, accumulated fatigue from previous crises, and the type of evidence presented. Our findings revealed that individuals with higher past crisis experience exhibited higher crisis message fatigue and greater household preparedness intention. However, caution is warranted when interpreting these findings. The respondents' perceived distinction between compound and single crisis preparedness lacked conceptual clarity, possibly due to the ongoing influence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The news media plays a vital role in influencing public perceptions about topics, issues and crises. They also act as important intermediaries between organizations and public, enabling organizations to shape how people think about crisis topics and actors. Monitoring news coverage and assessing the news media's agenda-setting role in a crisis can help organizations respond more effectively to emerging situations. When crises are prolonged and affect many countries, media analysis can become a tedious task for crisis managers. This study demonstrates how natural language processing (NLP) methods can be utilized in news media analysis of crisis situations, such as an extended cross-national pandemic. Specifically, it demonstrates the possibilities of using NLP to identify and compare the salience of diverse crisis topics and how the media treat these topics and crisis actors (first- and second-level agenda-setting) across countries, news outlets, and time. The COVID-19 pandemic serves as an illustrative case study to showcase the application of NLP techniques to provide insights into public perceptions of a major health crisis shaped by the news media in two Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden). Findings show the suitability of NLP methods to detect nuanced differences in news media coverage and offer relevant knowledge of how public perceptions and responsibility attribution fluctuate across time and countries.

In crisis scenarios, trust and knowledge sharing are rare and crucial for moderating the relationship between leadership and performance. This paper examines how leadership influences the performance of civil servants during crises in the public sector, mediated by trust and knowledge sharing. The authors develop a theoretical model and empirically test it with survey data from 346 civil servants in the public sector related to epidemic response in China. A structural equation model is used to examine the paths through which leadership affects performance. This research indicates that crisis leadership can directly enhance contextual performance but does not directly impact task performance. However, both explicit and tacit knowledge-sharing behaviour can exert significant mediating effects. Furthermore, cognition-based trust can indirectly influence task performance through a chain mediation effect involving explicit knowledge sharing. This research underscores the multifaceted impact of crisis leadership and elucidates how leaders can effectively navigate crises through different types of trust and knowledge-sharing strategies.

With the high rates of health workers' mortality and morbidity during health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, this study examined how safety leadership style could improve health workers safety performance with a mediating role of safety consciousness (SCC), and a moderating role of communication transparency (CT). Survey data from 582 health workers in Ghana's Greater Accra and Ashanti regions were gathered and analysed using structural equation modelling in SMART PLS 4. The findings show that safety leadership positively impacts safety performance. Additionally, safety leadership had a positive impact on affected consciousness. Again, SCC had a positive effect on performance. Furthermore, SCC mediated the positive relationship between safety leadership and safety performance. Finally, the SCC-safety compliance was negatively moderated by CT, though it did not moderate the SCC-safety participation relationship. This paper holds significance as it offers strategies to enhance the safety performance of frontline healthcare workers during health emergencies such as pandemics. The measures provided in the study potentially mitigate the risks of virus contraction and health workers during health emergencies.