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Communication with employees during times of crisis has become a crucial aspect of crisis management for building organizational resilience knowledge. Thus, explaining how internal crisis management promotes positive employee behaviour has become imperative. This study aims to investigate the relationship between internal crisis communication, job engagement, Organizational Citizenship Behaviour towards the Environment, Communicative behaviour for sensemaking and sensegiving and organizational resilience.

An online survey was conducted with 483 full-time employees in Pakistan. The structural equation modelling technique was employed to assess the study's hypotheses.

The findings of this study demonstrate that internal crisis communication can boost employee job engagement, organizational citizenship behaviour towards environment, sensemaking and sensegiving, which will also have a downstream effect on organizational resilience.

The findings of this study indicated that effective internal communication can aid managers in making well-informed decisions, coordinating response efforts and disseminating vital information to relevant stakeholders. As a result, this study contributes to the literature on internal crisis management by incorporating employee behavioural intention towards the environment. It provides managers and practitioners with knowledge on managing employees during a crisis.

Surprisingly, the conservation of resource theory (COR) does not explain communicative conduct (sensegiving) and environmental (e.g. organizational citizenship behaviour towards environment) components. This research combines the tenets of COR theory that have yet to be researched with the employees' environmental responses element. The mechanisms of cognition and communication were also ignored in earlier studies. This study sheds light on the process through which higher levels of job engagement, organizational citizenship behaviour towards environment and the capacity for comprehension (e.g. sensemaking) and meaning-transmission (e.g. sensegiving) ultimately help organizations navigate the crisis successfully.

The purpose of this article is to critically analyze the existing literature on internal social media (ISM) within the context of internal communication, aiming to provide a more nuanced understanding of the roles of ISM and its potential implications for communicative practices.

Drawing on a problematizing review methodology, the article conducts a critical analysis of a selected body of literature with the aim of problematizing assumptions that form the foundation of existing theories and constructs in the literature on ISM communication.

The article points out two interrelated critical issues that might constrain our understanding, scholarly conversation and theoretical development of the roles of ISM communication in organizations: (1) Philosophical inexplicitness; (2) Ontological inconsistency.

Assuming a communication perspective, the article contributes suggestions for future research on ISM in the context of internal communication, calling for research to: (1) explicitly consider the epistemological implications of philosophical positions, including the view of technology; and (2) foreground meaning creation processes as the analytical point of interest.

This study aims to quantitatively consolidate the research conducted over the past four decades on how internal branding activities drive employee commitment. It summarizes several operationalizations of internal branding and tests the moderating effect of employee’s personal characteristics and job characteristics on the relationship between internal branding and employee commitment.

This paper uses meta-analysis as the research methodology. The analysis includes a sample of 65 studies (from 62 published works), yielding 226 effect sizes (coded into 82 composite effect sizes) over an aggregated sample of 21,706 respondents.

This study finds that brand communication, brand-centered human resource management (HRM), training and development, organizational support and culture, brand-centered leadership and an excellent reward system are the key operationalizations of internal branding. Furthermore, employee’s personal (education, age and gender) and job (tenure, work status and level of customer orientation) characteristics significantly moderate the internal branding–employee commitment relationship.

Limited empirical literature on some of the internal branding operationalizations such as brand-centered HRM and rewards has curbed the scope of moderator analysis.

This paper proposes some effective ways of implementing internal branding strategies and provides support for boundary conditions that brand managers should consider to strengthen the impact of internal branding activities on employee commitment.

As per the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the few quantitative consolidations of four decades of research on the internal branding–employee commitment relationship.

Organizational reputation has come to the forefront amidst today’s increasingly competitive business environment. While the perspectives of external stakeholders continue to generate research attention among reputation scholars, perceptions of internal stakeholders like employees deserve similar or more focus due to their ability to sway external organizational reputation. Thoroughly understanding organizational variables that precede internal reputation perceptions among employees and the ensuing consequences enables effective reputation management measures. This study aims to develop a comprehensive framework that outlines the antecedents and consequences of the internal reputation concept.

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 review protocol was applied. Around 24 journal articles were drawn from the Web of Science and Scopus databases and analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

The review revealed 31 constructs related to the internal reputation concept, which were categorized into seven main themes, and a comprehensive framework was developed. Future research recommendations include the need to expand the study’s parameters, adopt a different research method and target varied contexts to achieve a more exhaustive systematic literature review on internal reputation.

This study attempts to contribute to the understanding of the internal reputation concept, theories and reputation management practices through its findings.

This paper provides the first known systematic literature review of the internal reputation concept, which could provide practical guidance to professionals in internal reputation management and academic guidance for future research in internal reputation.

Family businesses require internal communication (IC) to guide and provide direction, and the unique nature of involving both family and nonfamily employees add complexity. Navigating this complexity helps to ensure effective direction and management of family businesses. This paper explores the existing research concerning IC within family businesses and discusses the lenses and contexts through which it is commonly studied.

This paper provides a concise literature review to identify the most common lenses through which IC in family business has been researched.

IC in family enterprises is mostly studied through the lenses of IC between family generations, IC and the influence on family identity, and IC in times of crises. Existing research is largely focused on the role of family in IC, and limited consideration is given to the role of nonfamily members and family members outside of the business.

The paper synthesizes the direction and findings of existing research into IC within family business and provides avenues for future research. Managerial implications are also presented based on the synthesis of existing literature.

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of innovation in micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in India, focusing on the barriers and facilitators within their internal and external ecosystems.

A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from 1430 MSMEs across India, employing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze the relationships between internal and external factors and innovation adaptation.

The findings indicate that factors such as top management and organization structure, communication, technological capability and adaptation and organizational culture have a positive impact on innovation adaptation within the internal environment. Conversely, employee and market orientation, as well as financial factors, have a negative influence. Regarding the external environment, industry and competitive analysis, internationalization and partner alliances were found to positively affect innovation adaptation, whereas the country's infrastructure and policies had a negative impact.

The study emphasizes that MSMEs have the potential to leverage their internal and external environments to foster innovation within their organizations.

Digital transformation and innovation-driven development have become an international consensus. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of relationships, mechanisms and economic consequences between digital transformation and enterprise innovation quality in order to provide a benchmark for developing countries to implement digital transformation strategies and innovation-driven strategies and provide a major support for economic recovery in the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) era.

Using microdata from A-share listed enterprises in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2010 to 2021, this study examines the relationship between digital transformation and enterprise innovation quality and further reveals the internal logic and economic consequences of digital transformation to improve enterprise innovation quality through the mediating effect and moderating effect models.

The results demonstrate that digital transformation is beneficial for improving enterprise innovation quality. The heterogeneity test demonstrates that digital transformation has a larger effect on improving enterprise innovation quality in non-state-owned enterprises and eastern enterprises in China. The mechanism test demonstrates that digital transformation can improve enterprise innovation quality by improving internal control quality and analyst attention. Furthermore, with the increase in enterprise innovation inputs, digital transformation plays a significantly stronger role in improving enterprise innovation quality. The extended analysis demonstrates that digital transformation can significantly improve enterprise financial performance by improving innovation quality.

First, the construction of the core explanatory variable digital transformation index in this study is based on the Python data analysis software, which calculates the frequency of digital transformation in the text of the business situation analysis portion of the annual report of the listed companies and then obtains the degree of digital transformation of the company in this year. There may be some deviation from the degree of digital transformation in the actual production and operation of enterprises. Second, in addition to internal control quality and analyst attention, are there other mediating mechanisms for the impact of digital transformation on the quality of enterprise innovation? Third, whether the moderating effect of innovation input on digital transformation and innovation quality is related to human capital factors of the research and development (R&D) team, such as the technical background of R&D personnel, etc.

This study enriches the relevant theories of digital transformation and broadens the research boundaries of digital transformation and enterprise innovation. This study's result provides an empirical basis for enterprises to improve enterprise innovation quality and financial performance from the perspective of digital transformation at the micro level and points out specific practical directions, combining theory with practice.

This paper aims to explore the challenges and opportunities faced by buying centers in small and medium enterprises (SME) manufacturing companies in view of recent technological changes and the virtualization of communication.

This study uses a qualitative approach with multiple case studies to portray complex realities within the buying centers in the manufacturing SME context. The authors selected five Italian companies to portray the diverse characteristics, practices and policies of relevant stakeholders before reaching saturation with the issues explored.

The authors find that interactions among buying center members are more effective with greater collaboration and exchange (as opposed to competition and a struggle for power). Virtual/hybrid relations require greater intra-group cooperation, whereas diverse backgrounds and collaborative interactions help the flexibility and performance of the buying center. Greater use of technology produces certainty and automation, but it may also cause overload and biases that can be solved with the ability to analyze and clear responsibility for decisions.

The authors studied only five Italian companies in this study. Future research in other countries with diverse cultural and socio-economic conditions and methods would help extend this research.

The findings would improve the understanding of the challenges of adopting new purchase process technologies that would help automate routine tasks, produce useful data and support decision-making.

Unlike prior studies, this study uses an exploratory design to study the evolution of buying centers in SMEs to seek deeper insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by SMEs because of the growing use of emerging technologies.

The research aim of this article is to generate novel insights into how public sector organizations (PSOs) strategically communicate with the public about critical issues on social media. To this end, the study explores the public's experiences of the Swedish Police's sense of safety communication on Instagram in the third largest city in Sweden, where the lack of a sense of public safety is a main societal challenge.

The research was designed as a case study employing photo-elicitation interviews as a method to collect the empirical material. A phenomenography approach was used to analyze public experiences of the Swedish Police's Instagram communication in Malmö, Sweden.

Findings show that the police's strategic communication of safety on Instagram is experienced along the dimensions of a sense of protection, a sense of proximity and a sense of ambiguity. Taken together, these dimensions broaden and develop the knowledge of what communicating a sense of safety in the public sphere entails.

This study adds to previous research on strategic communication in public sector organizations by demonstrating what strategic communication accomplishes at the receiving end outside of the organization.

This article expands literature on user innovation by exploring the mechanisms that support user innovations in the context of a public organisation. Research has hitherto documented support mechanisms for user innovation in producer companies, where users contribute in early or temporary innovation phases as external non-employees or lead-users engaged by the producer. Complementarily, this paper explores a lesser known area of support mechanisms, those that support internal user innovations in a public sector setting.

Employing a qualitative study of a Norwegian public hospital at the interface between users (personnel and patients) and organisational support (facilitators who orchestrate user innovations), this article analyses in-house user innovation based on observations, text documentation and interviews over a four-year period.

In this public hospital, holistic organisational facilitation of “public user innovators” formed the key support mechanism built on “people” (facilitating co-creation), “process” (facilitating ideas, project realisation and implementation) and “coordination” (facilitating systems and communication). The findings show that public and producer organisational mechanisms both resemble and differ in many respects, as illustrated by the framework developed to describe these characteristics, such as that producers insource users, while the public organisation outsources production.

The originality of the article lies in the identification and description of “public user innovation”, a new term developed from this study of a public organisation in contrast to the dominant literature on producer companies. This article contributes new insights by differentiating the roles of user innovators and the mechanisms that support such innovations. New implications are drawn from the public side of organisational support in user innovation research.