Principles of Emergency Plans and Crisis Management

Operational dilemmas in safety-critical industries: The tension between organizational reputational concerns and the effective communication of risk

“…Recent research has opened up the domain of critically assessing the safety measures in organizations involved in safety-critical incidents, [e.g., British petroleum (BP) and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster (Amernic & Craig, 2017)] in light of the image repair strategy deployed by the organization (Harlow, Brantley, & Harlow, 2011). Research also shows that effective disclosure of incidents by an organization ensures that adequate safety and emergency management information is available and lessons learned (Crichton, Ramsay, & Kelly, 2009; Enander, 2018). Whilst the aforementioned research provides justification for incident disclosure, the reputation of the organization remains at tension with the principles of effective incident and risk communication (Smillie & Blissett, 2010) especially when there is the need to communicate and disclose such information with the accurate veracity, manner, quality and quantity.…”