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This manuscript reports an exploratory investigation to integrate emotions into the study of post-crisis communication. Using the discussion of the role of affect in Attribution Theory, the research integrates emotion into Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), one approach to post-crisis communication. SCCT uses crisis responsibility, how much people believe the organization is responsible for the crisis, to determine the most effective post-crisis communication strategy for protecting the organization's reputation. The research examines the amount of sympathy, anger, and schadenfreude generated by a variety of crisis types. The focus is on the connection between these three emotions and perceptions of crisis responsibility. The results suggest how emotion can be integrated into post-crisis communication and supports the value of including emotion in future research.

This research examines how chain hotels respond to the crisis in the context of situational crisis communication, focusing on the first emergence of the COVID-19 crisis and the second period of the pandemic, during which the pandemic was relatively weak.

The data were obtained from the digital announcements shared by the world's 50 most valuable hotel chains. The announcements, declared in the two phases of March–April and July–September 2020, were analyzed. The data were collected through document analysis and transferred to the MAXQDA program for qualitative content analysis. Interviews were held with the managers of chain companies to compare and confirm the results obtained.

Chain hotels announced regulations on existing reservations, potential customers, intermediary businesses, suppliers and employees by focusing on maintaining business reputation in the first phase of the pandemic. The hotel units seem to be more open to referrals on emergency measures from chain centers in this phase. In the second stage, announcements to increase sales were shared. The content of the crisis communication is in line with the predictions advocated under the situational crisis communication theory. In addition, some applications that do not comply with the theory are also identified.

The effects of the crisis communication on hotels were addressed; the responses of other stakeholders to the communication were not taken into account.

Successful response strategies must be considered when developing future crisis preparedness measures. Actors in the hospitality industry can adopt a situational crisis communication approach as an effective strategy to cope with the losses caused by a crisis and possibly speed recovery. Hotels can turn the crisis into an opportunity with the strategies they put forward during the pandemic and gain stronger reputations after the pandemic.

This study contributes to both the crisis management literature and the literature on COVID-19 by exemplifying the crisis communication measures and strategies of chain hotels. Focusing on different sub-processes in the analysis of crisis communication, revealing the background about the production and transfer of the information shared during the crisis, and interpreting the content of the messages by considering the benefit of the stakeholders and benefits of the hotel reveals the originality of this study.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the evolution of crisis communication and management along with its inclusion into the field and practice of emergency management. This paper also discusses the inclusion of nonprofit organizations and the need for these organizations to engage in crisis communication planning and strategy creation to address the diverse and numerous crises that nonprofits are at risk of experiencing.

This paper utilizes a systematic literature review of crisis communication planning tools and resources focused on nonprofit organizations to derive best practices and policy needs.

The resources analyzed provide foundational insight for nonprofit organizations to proactively develop plans and strategies during noncrisis periods to support their organization when a crisis occurs.

Limitations of this paper include limited academic research and practical resources related to nonprofit organizations and crisis communication planning. As such, several potential avenues for empirical research are discussed.

This paper provides considerations for nonprofit organizations engaging in crisis communication planning and aspects leaders need to partake in to reduce or eliminate the risk of facing an operational or reputational crisis.

This paper highlights the critical need to generate a crisis communication plan due to the diverse crises nonprofit organizations face and their connection to the emergency management structure. Understanding the crisis and utilizing a crisis communication plan allows nonprofit organizations a way to strategically mitigate the impact of a crisis while also providing essential services to their respective communities and maintain their overall stability.

This paper is unique in its analysis of crisis communication planning resources and creation of a planning framework to assist nonprofit organizations in their planning efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how organizational orators cope with situations where they must simultaneously address several audiences with clashing interests, conflicting identities and contradictory interpretations of crucial issues.

The paper draws on both the classical rhetorical tradition and various contemporary disciplines to delineate, conceptualize and critically discuss a repertoire of rhetorical strategies for dealing with composite audiences.

There are at least nine distinct strategies for dealing with the problem. Most of them make problematic assumptions about audiences. The most promising strategy involves shifting and blending frames.

Most managers will stand in situations where they have to cope with multiple and mutually antagonistic audiences. This paper provides practical suggestions for how to go about it.

The paper isolates and investigates a problem that was largely overlooked by classical rhetoricians, and contemporary scholars still underestimate its ubiquity, its complexity and its urgency. Apart from improving our grasp of the problem, the paper provides a comprehensive overview of potential solutions, and shows their shortcomings.

A good corporate image is important to organizations. However, little is elaborated on how organizations can work on their images. This study seeks to explicate the types of image management before, during, and after a crisis through the development of the crisis pre‐emptive image management model.

Integrating insights from communication and marketing literature, this paper uses cases from the USA, Europe and Asia to make the concepts come alive.

At each stage of Wilcox and Cameron's crisis life cycle, different types of image management can take place. At the proactive stage are image creation and maintenance; at the strategic stage are image strengthening and transformation; at the reactive stage is image repair; and at the recovery stage are image renewal and reinvention.

This paper is a comprehensive examination of the types of image management that organizations can consider as they seek to solidify their images at different stages of the organizations' existence.

This study demonstrates what organizations can do to communicate their desired images through multiple platforms with the aim of heightening their awareness of the profound effects lingering images have on the organization.

While certain concepts like image creation and maintenance and image repair have been explored before, this paper introduces new concepts like image strengthening, image transformation, image renewal, image reinvention, and enduring image with the view of demonstrating how image can work for or against the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the adaptation of communication strategies set out in the pre-crisis plan implemented by the members of Quebec’s public safety authorities in the specific case of the rail explosion and fire that destroyed the downtown of Lac-Mégantic in July 2013.

Based on a triangulation approach combining three qualitative methodologies, namely in-depth interviews, analysis of communication artifacts, and news analysis, this research aims to determine how public safety authorities used the existing crisis management plan at the time of the Lac-Mégantic crisis. It also seeks to determine whether or not the crisis managers used emergent communication strategies, as defined by Mintzberg (2007). Finally, the case study also seeks to identify potentially unforeseen contextual elements that influenced the communication strategies deployed.

The analysis reveals that the disaster, whose magnitude and consequences were unprecedented in Canada, prompted those in charge of public safety to review the established crisis management communication strategies and practices in order to adapt to the realities of a particular terrain and context. It is important to mention, first, that the crisis was managed in an unforeseen context of a twofold digital divide that created a dead zone for emergency and public health messages; and, second, that direct communication with the victims revealed major difficulty in understanding such messages (literacy). As a result, the traditional and digital communication strategies established in the crisis management plan had to be rapidly reviewed in order to incorporate “old-fashioned” communication tools, such as giving out information door-to-door, meeting with people on their front porches, and holding informal street gatherings with public health doctors and social workers to better communicate messages to the disaster victims and to promote the adoption of safe behaviors.

The findings demonstrate that in a crisis and emergency context, communication efforts must sometimes deviate from the planned strategies and come back to simple, direct, and “human” communication methods in order to adapt to the realities of the victims.

This research aims to investigate how critical media coverage of an organisation affects its employees. The authors expect the effects to be similar to the way media coverage about an individual would affect this person, termed “reciprocal effects”.

Drawing on a framework for the analysis of reciprocal effects of mass media by Kepplinger and qualitative interviews among employees of 14 different organisations undergoing a crisis, the authors develop an employee-model of reciprocal effects for the context of organisational crises.

This qualitative research shows that employees are affected by media coverage on a critical issue about their employer. Mass media are an important source of information for employees in critical situations. The data indicate interpersonal conversations with colleagues are also important for obtaining information and coping with the situation. Employees show emotional reactions, such as helplessness or shame, and a tendency to defend their employer. The better employees feel informed by their organisation's internal communication, the better they know how to cope with the situation. The data indicate that the effects vary with the employees' level of organisational identification.

The findings imply that open and constant internal communication with employees during a crisis fosters reactions that stabilise the organisation in critical situations.

The study presented here is the first systematic analysis of the impact of media coverage of an organisation on its employees.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the relationships among the intellectual ability of artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive emotional processes and the positive and negative reactions of human members. The authors also examined the moderating role of AI status in teams.

The authors designed an experiment and recruited 120 subjects who were randomly distributed into one of three groups classified by the upper, middle and lower organization levels of AI in the team. The findings in this study were derived from subjects’ self-reports and their performance in the experiment.

Regardless of the position held by AI, human members believed that its intelligence level is positively correlated with dependence behavior. However, when the AI and human members are at the same level, the higher the intelligence of AI, the more likely it is that its direct interaction with team members will lead to conflicts.

This paper only focuses on human–AI harmony in transactional work in hybrid teams in enterprises. As AI applications permeate, it should be considered whether the findings can be extended to a broader range of AI usage scenarios.

These results are helpful for understanding how to improve team performance in light of the fact that team members have introduced AI into their enterprises in large quantities.

This study contributes to the literature on how the intelligence level of AI affects the positive and negative behaviors of human members in hybrid teams. The study also innovatively introduces “status” into hybrid organizations.

Purpose: To analyse the acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) operations and robotic process automation (RPA) by comparing its market size and revenue worldwide during the pandemic and, measuring the impact of AI investment levels on jobs human resource functions, and analysing the role of AI in future work.

Design/Methodology: The archival data analysis technique is used to fetch data from sources like the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), Statista, Deloitte, Mc Kinsey, Strata, Tractica, and IDC. Descriptive analysis with supporting literature has been contextually used for each objective which further establishes practical and theoretical implications of AI, intelligent process automation (IPA), and RPA in different industries during Covid-19 pandemic. This study analysed active scholarly articles from the Scopus database and presented results and findings.

Findings: The findings of the study state that emerging technologies such as AI, IPA, and RPA have a strong potential impact on market size, revenue, number of jobs, and investments levels during the pandemic. The global investment in AI is projected to witness an upsurge from 2018 to 2027, which significantly impacts the human workforce in various industries. The results of the study state that AI/RPA seems to be a crucial technological intervention, especially in times of the pandemic.

Originality/Value: This study contributes to the body of knowledge by constructing a base for understanding the pace of AI/RPA/IPA intervention and its significant impact on organisation process, structure, and people in different sectors. The timeline and forecast of this study intend to make industry consultants future to prepare to align themselves in an era of digital disruption.