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

Abstract

PurposeThe 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/approachA 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.FindingsThree 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/implicationsAn 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/valueThis 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.

Sensemaking by Employees in Essential versus Non-essential Professions During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Comparison of Effects of Change Communication and Disruption Cues on Mental Health, Through Interpretations of Identity Threats and Work Meaningfulness

“…Analyzing responses from nearly 500 full-time U.S. employees during April 2020, Li et al (2021) showed how transparent internal communication reduced employees’ change-related uncertainty, aided their ability to cope with the associated stress, and improved organization-employee relationships. Internal organizational crisis communication in the form of sense-giving and meaning-making discourse by leaders in two U.K. universities helped employees make sense of the implications of the COVID-19 health crisis ( Yeomans & Bowman, 2021 ). Such communication involved core narratives of organizational resilience and competence; empathy, reassurance, and recognition; and aspects of location and community.…”

Employee-centric perspective on organizational crisis: how organizational transparency and support help to mitigate employees' uncertainty, negative emotions and job disengagement

“…, 2019; Li et al. , 2021; Yeomans and Bowman, 2021), broader findings on job frustration and employees' self-protective mechanism of job disengagement are scarce. Particularly, the study of employees' job disengagement as a separate construct is important, as an employee's withdrawal from his/her work role goes beyond a mere absence of employee engagement.…”

Construção de Sentido por Coordenadores Universitários na Pandemia

“…Esses fatos trazem a oportunidade de estudar o sensemaking dentro de um contexto extremamente difícil, novo e em rápida mudança (Yeomans & Bowman, 2021). Nesse cenário imprevisível e avassalador, a construção de sentido é mais complexa.…”

“…No campo dos estudos organizacionais, as pesquisas sobre sensemaking examinam como acontece a construção de sentido e seu impacto nos principais momentos vividos nas organizações. Abordam, por exemplo, as situações vividas pelas pessoas nos momentos de tomada de decisões, mudanças estratégicas, projetos de inovação e de aprendizagem organizacional, dentre outras (Brown, Colville & Pye, 2014;Maitlis & Christianson, 2014;Yeomans & Bowman, 2021).…”