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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.

Journalists moving into corporate communication have for many years been regarded as a move to the “dark side”. This paper turns the lens to explore how trained journalists working as internal communication practitioners due to their journalistic self-concept and skills can contribute to internal communication.

An interview study was conducted with twelve trained journalists working with internal communication in different types of organizations. Three indicators of professionalism, namely autonomy, altruism and expert knowledge, were used as categories to structure the interviews and analysis.

The respondents perceived that their journalistic self-concept and skills helped them identify the employee perspective, write relevant stories and deliver them quickly. Furthermore, their courage and lack of fear of authorities enabled them to challenge decisions made by their senior managers, especially regarding how, what and when to communicate.

The three indicators of the journalist profession, – autonomy, altruism and journalistic knowledge and skills – may help establish internal communication that is relevant, transparent and trustworthy.

Organizations may benefit from building their internal communication around the three indicators of the journalist profession. They could, for example, host independent internal media that present the employees’ perspective and maintain a critical attitude to the organization in a relevant and compelling manner.

Few studies have explored the role of journalists working as internal communication practitioners and their contributions to internal communication.

This study of job advertisements for internal communication practitioners aims to investigate the signals that organisations are sending the profession about what is required of these roles. The concept of corporate voice – the “voice” of the organisation – is problematised to explore tensions in vocality. The aim is to support communication practitioners to navigate multi-vocality in the evolving professional context of digital communication technologies and changes in the workplace.

This qualitative study considers the role of voice in corporate communication practices and offers insights into “digital disruption” and the discursive pressure of employers' priorities on the profession and its practices. Job advertisements for internal communication practitioners were examined during 6-month periods in 2018, 2020 and 2022, which was a significant time of change for the profession with the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Qualitative content analysis of 514 internal communication job advertisements identifies that control and consistency are valorised, and continue to dominate descriptions of internal communication skills and responsibilities. The digital affordances that communication practitioners rely on has not changed significantly and a preference for “broadcasting” is evident.

This study provides insights into how Australian organisations shape and sustain univocal corporate communication practices, and the incompatibility of narrow configurations of voice with emerging organisational challenges such as social connectedness.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to provide rich, qualitative insights around internal communication in strategic communication agencies, addressing the evolutions in expectations and best practices for agency leadership through COVID-19.

Qualitative interview study with 18 US-based leaders of public relations and advertising agencies to examine their experiences of leading and managing strategic communication teams during COVID-19.

Synthesized findings around changes in leadership values and important facets of ongoing internal crisis communication led to the development of the following five categories—Improvisation and Flexibility, Transparency and Trust, Ownership and Embodiment, Care and Empathy, Relationships and Resilience.

Using a high-value sample, the study is the first (to the best of the authors' knowledge) to focus on the crucial context of agencies and internal communication around COVID-19; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); and other pandemic-era challenges. It provides theoretical implications around ongoing, internal crisis communication and practical implications for agency leaders in crisis.

This paper reflects on antecedents that may cause academic fields to decline or stagnate. It uses a hermeneutic review to consolidate and critique the Internal Marketing (IM) field. Seminal studies of IM and its related construct Internal Marketing orientation (IMO) are identified. IMO is then juxtaposed with contemporary studies from a communications journal identified as core as part of the hermeneutic process.

This study critiques the IMO literature in a hermeneutic review. It draws on the auto-ethnographic tradition to compare IMO with contemporary, related communications articles.

Two antecedents are addressed. There is interest in IM but less so in IMO. Aspects from the IMO literature align with two broad areas, namely customer-centric and company-centric communications. Some IMO aspects have been developed further therein.

This paper recognizes further research opportunities for IMO and communications scholars with a greater focus on boundary spanning employees in national, sectoral and organizational settings. Being conceptual means it lacks empirical testing; being hermeneutic means it contributes to methodological plurality.

Despite having potentially profound organizational effects, IMO lacks awareness and adoption. Recommendations are made throughout to facilitate the adoption of improved communications apropos improving IMO.

The paper identifies employee/employer benefits of adopting good internal communications (IC). IM(O) provides a rationale for sound IC practices.

This paper partially addresses the paucity of research into IMO including BSEs. It improves conceptualization by consolidating the key IMO research on the development and measurement of the construct, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses within the literature.

This study is concerned with the dynamics of the internal communications at Netflix following the release of The Closer and the public debate that followed, testing Netflix's long-standing reputation for promoting diverse content and supporting a progressive organizational culture.

Using the circuit of culture (CoC) as a theoretical framework, this study applies a case study approach to analyze internal communication and strategic public relations in addressing this crisis.

This study's findings illustrate that by failing to interpret two of the five moments of the CoC, production and identity, Netflix negated the very values that constitute its brand. These findings have implications for how public relations' long-standing focus on two-way symmetrical communication is problematic, especially in the workplace.

The findings situate how the exertion of power within an organization, particularly in moments of identity and production, problematize the role of two-way symmetrical communication within an organization in crisis.

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.

This paper aims to propose various theoretical lenses to explore the relationship between internal communication (IC) and its impact on employee loyalty.

A systematic review followed by a synthesis of the literature is adopted after identifying articles from various databases such as Scopus, Google Scholar and EBSCO and found that employee loyalty remains a significant gap in organisational IC research. The review will bring greater attention and focus for scholars to check how IC can help increase employee loyalty using the proposed theories – more so for IC in the Asia-Pacific.

The findings from this paper explicitly highlight that both individual/managerial theories (social cognitive, social identity, social exchange, expectancy and socio-analytic theories) and organisational theories (network, resource-based view and sensemaking theories) are close and relevant to study the IC and employee loyalty.

The value of this review is to move forward the debate on how IC can significantly contribute to developing employee outcomes (loyalty), how it can further enhance employee performance and commitment and what theories better explain this relationship. This review will inspire and inform future scholars to explore IC’s role in employee loyalty in the Asia-Pacific context.

Motivated by the organizational challenge coined the great discontent, employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, see minimal opportunities for growth and are actively searching for new roles. This research aims to take a novel approach to internal communication strategy by introducing employability culture and leadership empowerment as mechanisms for supporting employees' career growth and additional positive workplace outcomes.

An online survey was designed and administered in the United States. The final sample size includes 425 full-time employees working in a variety of roles, industries and work arrangements.

Findings point to the inherent need for revised internal communication strategy that goes beyond managing and disseminating information. Organizations must develop cultures and their leaders in ways that empower employees and help them understand the meaning of their work. Employability culture, or an organization's support for developing employees' adaptive skills as work roles change, positively predicted employees' perceptions of their career growth opportunities at their current place of employment, employee loyalty and engagement, and job satisfaction. Leadership empowerment behaviors also positively predicted all previously listed workplace variables. These perceptions as influenced by work arrangement (onsite, hybrid, fully remote) and younger versus older generations were also analyzed.

Research findings offer new strategies for internal communications. Internal communication teams can partner alongside executive leadership to develop a culture that helps employees envision how their skills and expertise translates to different areas of the organization, empowering them to find meaning in their work, and be driven to support organizational growth.