1. Introduction
A
business crisis can be anything that can negatively affect a company’s
reputation or bottom line. In the current day situation no business is immune
to crisis. How to deal with public relations where company’s image and pride
are at stake is the crucial thing during business crisis. Therefore, crisis
management turns to be necessary for any company to handle a major event that
threatens to harm the organization, its stakeholders, or the general public.
However, with the development of economy, crisis management has been changed a
lot in terms of different kinds of motives. Social media, resources as well as
expertise are regarded as the key motives that induce the shifts of crisis
management.
2. Social
Media
As Argenti mentioned in his articles, social media is
certainly a part of this crisis management and is contributing to the increased
media scrutiny present today.
Ÿ
Historical Perspective
Crisis
management should be best understood as part of a broad continuum of activities
as following stages: Pre-Crisis, Crisis Response, Post-Crisis.
In
the past, in the stage of “pre-crisis”, company always has a plan to prevent or
lessen the negative outcomes of a crisis and thereby protect the organization,
stakeholders from damage. Besides,
the news cycle of crisis used to be small, which means it was not very hard to monitor
a certain number of media who would cover the crisis and the reaction from
public.
In
the stage of formulating strategic responses. In the past, organizations had
significantly more time to respond to a crisis for the delay of traditional
media (newspaper or TV).
In
the stage of post-crisis, in the past, companies used to manage the crisis by
working with traditional media. But they hardly use traditional media to follow
up the situation after the crisis.
Ÿ Shifts
Social
media make crisis hardly to be predictable, which means, it’s tough for company
to prepare for every single crisis event. You wouldn’t know which YouTube clips
were going to get the most attention or hits and you can’t predict how the
media is going to end up covering the crisis. Therefore, crisis management plan
is not enough to assess the crisis in real time, now are more companies to
crisis management team to handle any crisis. Compared with previous “individual
fight”, now CMT forces members to work together with fast pace (Fischer & Boynton, 2005) .
On
top of that, Owing to social media, savvy companies today not only monitor the
social media for crisis but also use these platforms to listen customers
concerns and keep people informed, which actually a way to build mutual trust
with customers.
In
the next stage, with the speed that social media is facilitating, the old rules
of thumb like having 24 hours to respond to a crisis are no longer valid. In
other words, companies must response to crisis extraordinarily quickly as soon
as it comes up.
At
last, social media helps customers to reveal the truth of the matter so that
people are aware that they are not always very smart about whom they trust,
especially many scandals accrue (Kramer, 2009) . Also, social media
now are widely used to manage post-crisis, like collecting crisis records,
stakeholder feedback, in order to reshape their images and rebuild the trust
among customers.
3. Diverse
Resources
The
resources that needs to be utilized in a crisis management includes relation
resources like media and states, technical resources like software and internal
network, financial resources and human resources like PR experts, scholars and
other professional talents.
Ÿ Historical
Perspective
In
the past, when there is no so many resources, the operations and strategies to
deal with crisis are very simple and mainly concentrated on the crisis stage.
Ÿ Shifts
But
now those resources are also utilized in pre-crisis stage and post crisis
stage. And the process of integrating and utilizing them becomes more
complicated in the collaboration in a crisis. Nowadays crisis management team
are required to obtain higher ability of managing resources due to the
complexity and diversity of resources.
Through
three aspects of collaboration in crisis management teams, we can see how these
resources lead to those conflicts in details.
First
aspect is cross-function, which involve experts and professionals in different
fields into a crisis management team. Companies deliberately avoid virtuoso teams,
which are consist of star performers who are handpicked to play specific, key
roles, thinking that the risks are too high. Because it's tough to keep
virtuoso teams together once they achieve their goals-burnout and the lure of
new challenges rapidly winnow the ranks (Fischer & Boynton, 2009) . If there is no
obvious rules of making decisions or fair rights of speaking, the issue of
ambiguity of jurisdiction may occur and lead to task conflicts.
Secondly,
in cross-section situation, people from different places, organizations and
countries may have issue of language and cultural difference. And an
organization’s relationships with its environment influence those individuals
and the choices they make (McAllum, 2013) .
Last
but not least, differences in collaborative tools require a crisis management
team to learn new knowledge. In this improvement, there will be some conflicts
between original knowledge or habits and brand-new ones. If the team cannot use
those tools efficiently and effectively, process conflicts may occur.
Thus,
resources differences creates a lot of conflicts, which may affect the
performance of a crisis management team.
As
we know, a high performance team can do more than the same number of
individuals, which is usually called synergy. And a high performance team has
following features. Those conflicts for the diversity of resources are related
to the performance of a crisis management team. For example, whether the crisis
management team has clear goals, roles, and rewards and punishments is related
to group identification and ambiguity of jurisdiction. And task conflicts may
happen in a cross-function situation due to the diversity of human resources.
For
a high performance team, it can reduce the conflicts and managing those
resources very well. So in order to have a good performance in crisis
management like quick responses, satisfied feedbacks from stakeholders and good
images, a good ability of managing those resources and reducing conflicts consequently
is a need for a crisis management team with the development of international crisis
management. And our prediction is that the ability of managing resources for a crisis
management team will be higher due to the increasing complexity and diversity
of resources.
4. Expertise
Crisis
management concerned a lot about the expertise such as communication skills,
psychology knowledge, sociology knowledge, politics knowledge and management
knowledge. Apologizing
in public is not easy, especially for leaders. (Kellerman, 2006)
Ÿ Historical
Perspective
In
the past the expertise used in crisis management is limited such as where is
rarely related major and specific department to deal with crisis; they just
sent the most talent people who can communicate with public in a better way to
manage the crisis.
Ÿ Shifts
As
the crisis management became more and more important in the business and
political area, the expertise applied in the crisis management also play a more
important role than ever. They must be ready to respond, which means having an
executive crisis team at the ready, a contingency budget set aside for crisis response,
and – as
we’ve outlined – a
solid plan for working through the nuances of the specific scandal. (Roehm, 2009) The situation in
dealing with crisis has shifted from common sense practice to expertise
practice.
First
of all, the demand of expertise in dealing with crisis results in the
appearance of related majors and research, the birth of Public Relations
Company and Consultant Company as well
as the various kinds of related training and lectures.
These
changes in crisis management have caused the innovation of collaboration
pattern when developing crisis management plan and cooperating with tea members
in crisis management. For example, hiring
expert to design tools and systems to detect the crisis, assess the situation
and recover from the crisis; Selecting communicate expert who can manage the accuracy
and consistency of the delivered messages to be the spokesman; employing
psychologists to design the reaction strategy according to people’s different
psychological activity in different situations.
5. Conclusion
It
seems that under the influence of these three motives, the shifts of crisis
management will still exist and turn out to be both magnitude and complexity in the future.
Reference
1. Government
of India. (2006). Crisis Management: From Despair to Hope. New Delhi: Second
Administrative Reforms Commission, 4-11.
2. Bill Fischer,
& Andy Boynton. (2009, May). Virtuoso Teams. Harvard Business Review, 117-123.
3. Kirstiey
McAllum. (2013). Workplace Conflict: Three Paths to Peace. IESE Insight, 48-55.
4. Alice
M. Tybout and Michelle Roehm. (2009, December). Let the Response Fit the
Scandal. Harvard Business Review, 82-85.
5. Barbara Kellerman. (2006, April). When Should a
Leader Apologize – and When Not? Harvard business review, 72-81.
6. Fischer,
Bill; Boynton, Andy (2005). Virtuoso Teams. Harvard Business Review. P121
7. Kramer,
Roderick M. (2009). Rethinking Trust. Harvard Business Review. P70
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