Mid Sweden University

Crisis communication is important to manage crises and enhance resilience in order to organize for and achieve sustainable communities. In public health emergency responses, communication skills were an important attribute for crisis leadership together with the ability to inspire trust, coordinate diverse participants across different disciplines, decisiveness with flexibility, situational awareness and competence in public health science (Deitchman, 2013). Leaders are responsible for and expected to minimize the impact of crises, enhance crisis management capacity, and coordinate crisis management efforts. In essence, crisis leadership is a communicative process, in which leadership actors communicate to fulfill a common goal (Johansson, 2017). However,existing crisis communication research more often focuses on organizational leaders’ communicative management of the organization’s reputation (e.g., Coombs, 2016; Littlefield & Quenette, 2007; Ngai & Falkheimer, 2017; Waymer & Heath, 2007). Hence, the research record predominantly reduces crisis leadership to managing organizations’ images, with the notable exception of discourse of renewal research, which focus on establishing resilience post crisis (Seeger, et al., 2005; Ulmer, et al., 2007). As Wouter, Dückers, and van der Velden (2016) noted, “much remains to be clarified in terms of how actual leadership tasks are undertaken and balanced by way of crisis management” (p. 56). This study answers that call and focus on the process of communicative crisis management by leaders.The study develops a new framework for effective crisis communication leadership based on an explorative study including 40 interviews with Swedish and U.S. government officials, addressing: (1) How crisis leaders communicatively create resources, organize and prepare for crisis management, (2) How crisis leaders develop communicative strategies for crisis management with internal and externalstakeholders, (3) How crisis leaders communicatively enable inter‐organizational collaboration in order to organize for sustainable communities.