The Role of Storytelling in Crisis Communication: A Test of Crisis Severity, Crisis Responsibility, and Organizational Trust

TLDR

The study examined whether storytelling in crisis communication influences trust, crisis severity, and responsibility perceptions using a 2×2 experimental design. The experiment compared storytelling versus no storytelling across external and internal crisis control conditions. Storytelling maintained organizational trust and lowered responsibility attribution, but crisis locus of control did not moderate these effects, highlighting the need to explore storytelling’s ethical communication role.

Abstract

This study tested the effectiveness of storytelling as a crisis communication strategy with a 2 (Storytelling: Present Vs. Not-Present) × 2 (Crisis Locus of Control: External Vs. Internal) experiment. The effect of using storytelling was tested on perceptions of trust, crisis severity, and crisis responsibility. Findings indicate that storytelling effectively maintains the level of trust toward the organization and reduces the responsibility attribution during crisis. However, crisis locus of control did not moderate the effects of storytelling on perceptions of the proposed dependent variables. Findings suggest practical and theoretical need to examine the use of storytelling, including ethically communicating about a crisis.