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Internal crisis communication and the social construction of emotion: university leaders' sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic

Liz Yeomans (Leeds Business School, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK)
Sarah Bowman (Faculty of Arts Design and Social Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK)

Journal of Communication Management

ISSN: 1363-254X

Article publication date: 18 June 2021

Issue publication date: 20 July 2021

1468

Abstract

Purpose

The paper explores university leaders' employee-focused sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 health crisis. The aim is to reveal how leadership sensegiving narratives construct emotion in the rhetor-audience relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

A social constructionist, sensemaking approach centres on the meaning-making discourse of university leaders. Using rhetorical discourse analysis (RDA), the study analysed 67 emails sent to staff during a three-month period at the start of the global pandemic. RDA helps to reveal how university leaders help employees make sense of changing realities.

Findings

Three core narratives: organisational competence and resilience; empathy, reassurance and recognition; and community and location reveal a multi-layered understanding of leadership sensegiving discourse in which emotion intersects with material and temporal sensemaking dimensions. In supporting a process of organisational identification and belonging, these core narratives help to mitigate audience dissonance driven by the antenarrative of uncertainty.

Research limitations/implications

An interpretivist approach was used to analyse qualitative data from two UK universities. While focused on internal communication, the employee perspective was not examined. Nevertheless, this paper extends the human dimension of internal crisis communication, building on constructionist approaches that are concerned with emotion and sensegiving.

Originality/value

This paper expands the domain of internal crisis communication. It integrates the social construction of emotion and sensemaking with the underexplored material and temporal dimensions in internal crisis communication and applies RDA.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their valuable comments and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article. The authors also thank the two universities studied.

Citation

Yeomans, L. and Bowman, S. (2021), "Internal crisis communication and the social construction of emotion: university leaders' sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic", Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 196-213. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCOM-11-2020-0130

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited

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