Readiness for Renewal: Extending Renewal to Organizational Preparedness

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis:  A crisis is an unexpected event or issue that can significantly harm or undermine the high-priority goals of an organization. Organizations must be capable of communicating effectively through crises, especially when it involves the health and safety of individuals. Most research on crisis communication looks at the crisis response rather than organizational resiliency to survive a crisis. Renewal is an organization’s ability to recover and rebuild after a crisis occurs. Crisis management scholars have highlighted the need to enhance organizational resiliency before crises occur, including strengthening organizational learning and building positive stakeholder relationships. We argue that it is also important to take stock of whether an organization capably engages in ethical communication, learns directly or vicariously from organizational failures, frames reality effectively, and articulates a forward-looking vision. We draw on the Discourse of Renewal theory, a crisis communication theory, to develop an instrument to assess an organization’s “readiness for renewal,” the communication practices that organizations engage in to provide a buffer against negative events. 

Methods:  In Study 1, we disseminated a 40-item questionnaire to a single high reliability organization (N=340) to investigate a seven-factor structure of readiness for renewal. To analyze data, we used confirmatory factor analysis, an approach based on theory.        In Study 2, we collected data from 376 full-time employees at organizations that had experienced crises in the past six months with a 21-item questionnaire. 

Results:  Study 1 lacked discrimant validity. We revised our models to focus on four factors of renewal. We reduced the number of questions from 40 to 21 and collected additional data in a follow-up study with a different sample. Study 2 supported a bifactor solution, where items were part of an overarching factor that represented readiness for renewal, and specific factors that represented ethical communication, organizational learning, effective organizational rhetoric, and prospective vision. Item analysis of the instrument indicated that each item contributed significantly to the general factor and each related significantly to its designated specific factor. Reliability estimates for the bifactor solution revealed that the general construct of renewal had high internal consistency. However, the contributions of each subscale were not high enough to support individual interpretation of the subscales.

Conclusions: 

In light of Discourse of Renewal theory, a common factor interpretation makes sense. Successful examples of renewal are those where an organization practices all of the facets, while unsuccessful cases are those where one or more are attempted or other conditions are not met due to crisis or organization type. 

Implications for research and/or practice: This paper addresses calls for thought leadership on crisis communication to export crisis communication knowledge to organizations and public officials and test normative theories of crisis communication. Researchers could deploy this questionnaire quickly during an actual crisis or following a crisis. Researchers could also use the questionnaire to inform organizational crisis planning. The findings from this survey may provide a perception check to these organizations, and suggest areas for improvement. Scholars who are interested in incorporating readiness for renewal into their works could use our questionnaire with other measures of crisis planning.