“Relaaax, I remember the recession in the early 1980s …”: Organizational storytelling as a crisis management tool

Abstract

In this conceptual paper, we consider organizational storytelling as a communications tool in which stories are used to reduce the stress and anxiety of organizational members during a crisis. While there is much consensus among organizational scholars detailing storytelling's active role in such processesas organizational learning and performance (Boje, 1991;Czarniawska, 1998), knowledge sharing and knowledge management (Denning, 2000), management development (Morgan & Dennehy, 1997), and normative organizational behavior (Poulton, 2005) When organizational storytelling scholars recently covened for their annual Organizational Storytelling Weekend in Washington, D.C., the symposium' s founder, Steve Denning, observed that for the first time, their meeting was taking place

Collective bargaining as the negotiation of competing stories

“…During our first meeting with the administration’s bargaining team in June 2012, they quickly sought to establish the narrative of financial crisis, employing the specific words ‘crisis’ and ‘dire’ and hence establishing their intended plot of ‘there’s no money’. As Kopp et al (2011: 376) predicted, ‘stories deployed in crises would supplant the normal dominant narrative of the organization’, the latter of which in our case was a much more marketable narrative of a premier ‘destination’ and ‘experience’ characterized by productivity in research, excellence in teaching and vibrancy in campus life. The desired implication of the story that emerged during negotiations was that the union must immediately and significantly lower its expectations.…”

Just Paying Attention: Communication for Organizational Attention

“…The inference about communication interventions promoting organizational attention relies primarily on prior research in dialogic interventions such as AARs and storytelling. Nevertheless, research on storytelling has consistently discussed how it fundamentally benefits collective sensemaking (e.g., Kopp et al, 2011), which is critical to dialogue and organizational attention. Similarly, AARs constitute an established field of research and the findings have been consistent in terms of the benefits to organizational teams by fostering attention to critical incidents, and as a form of creating relationships (Lipshitz et al, 2007) that can lead to information allocation.…”

“…Rosile et al (2013) consider the storytelling process by organizational members under a materialist practice and warn about taking a managerial approach and controlling the narrative. Thus, the main benefit of organizational storytelling should be how it enables organizational sensemaking (Kopp, Nikolovska, Desiderio, & Guterman, 2011).…”

“…The development of these stories can influence the future of the organization (Baruch, 2009). Ideally, the storytelling process to cocreate the future of the organization would follow what Kopp et al (2011) call "epic stories" (p. 381)-stories that are rich in imagery and fulfill organizational members' need. Furthermore, the development of these stories would promote prospective sensemaking (Boje & Gomez, 2008) of desired futures.…”

“Man, Have I Got a Story for You”

“…Individuals learn in and from work experiences, which are influenced in large part by organizational culture (Patterson et al, 2005) and social practices; these are often the foundation for employee storytelling (Kopp, Nikolovska, Desiderio, & Guterman, 2011), as a means for encoding and transmitting information and thinking (Gargiulo, 2006) about particular experiences. Stories or narratives are viewed by many as sense-making tools (see Weick, 1995), and as artifacts of learning experiences (see Peterson, 1991; Schwabenland, 2006) that can (re)shape practice and cultural norms.…”