NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Back to results
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
ERIC Number: EJ946173
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1044-8004
EISSN: N/A
"Relaaax, I Remember the Recession in the Early 1980s...": Organizational Storytelling as a Crisis Management Tool
Kopp, David M.; Nikolovska, Irena; Desiderio, Katie P.; Guterman, Jeffrey T.
Human Resource Development Quarterly, v22 n3 p373-385 Fall 2011
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 processes as 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), the literature is still evolving on how the act of storytelling could facilitate not only how organizational members make sense of a crisis, but also how they adapt to the inevitable organizational changes following a crisis. In particular, storytelling--with its narrative process--can be utilized to manage how the organizational members react to the crisis by absorbing what Patriotta (2003) called "the discordance by constructing a plot around a disruptive occurrence" (p. 163). Indeed, making sense of a crisis follows Weick's (1995) disruption-transformation-solution framework. We argue that storytelling should be part of an organization's crisis-management program, per se. As human resource development and organizational crisis-management disciplines share great commonality and concerns in areas dealing with organizational behavior during crises, we propose that storytelling can be used as HRD's toolkit in leveraging human capital pre-, during, and post-crises. (Contains 4 footnotes.)
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Subscription Department, 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774. Tel: 800-825-7550; Tel: 201-748-6645; Fax: 201-748-6021; e-mail: subinfo@wiley.com; Web site: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/browse/?type=JOURNAL
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Adult Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A