A group of researchers has determined that the anxiety you convey in responding to a crisis is passed along to your stakeholders and can negatively impact the effectiveness of the communications. The researchers helpfully provide some advice on how to avoid this.

Dritjon Gruda, Arménio Rego and Miguel Pina e Cunha — academics connected with Portuguese institutions — lay out their ideas in a Feb. 23 article in California Management Review, which is affiliated with the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

The piece is based on a more academic article Gruda co-authored in 2022 with the underpinning research. That study used machine learning to conduct sentiment analysis of 505 stakeholder responses to 18 corporate crisis announcements on Facebook.

The researchers found that, through what they call anxiety contagion, “the anxiety embedded in your crisis communications operates as an invisible force multiplier, potentially causing more damage than the original crisis itself,” according to the Feb. 23 article. They write that “when your organization communicates with detectable anxiety during crises, public anxiety increases measurably and predictably.”

Stakeholder Anxiety

Although the research doesn’t exactly connect the dots between induced stakeholder anxiety and negative reception of an organization’s crisis response, we don’t think it would be wrong to take that as a given.

The authors invoke a famous example from 2010, when BP’s then-CEO, Tony Hayward, said in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, “I’d like my life back.” “He was transmitting his personal anxiety to millions of stakeholders, amplifying the crisis exponentially,” they write.

The level of stakeholder anxiety depends on the strategy used to respond to the crisis, according to the research.

Not surprisingly, the lowest overall public anxiety levels followed the approach of acknowledging responsibility — “even when organizational anxiety was present,” the authors write.

‘Consistently Backfired’

Minimizing responsibility — making excuses — “consistently backfired” and substantially increased public anxiety.

Paradoxically, evading responsibility by blaming others resulted in lower stakeholder anxiety. “This ‘blaming paradox’ might occur because stakeholders temporarily accept the blame shift, reducing their personal threat perception,” the authors write. But they warn against relying on this, opining that “it creates a trust deficit that damages long-term relationships. The data clearly show that acknowledging responsibility produces better outcomes across all metrics.”

The researchers, all management experts, offer some practical advice on how to lower the anxiety conveyed, such as establishing a “responsibility-acknowledgment-first” policy and training leaders in emotional regulation. They also suggest creating a “Crisis Communication Audit Team” to review messaging for the to-be-avoided “anxiety markers.”

Language Focus

In our view, that review work could be done by the regular crisis communications team, but we admit the authors’ language-focused tips for the work itself are intriguing. They suggest avoiding:

• Defensive words, such as however, despite and although
• Overuse of qualifiers and hedging words, such as might, possibly, somewhat and arguably (“These words telegraph uncertainty and amplify stakeholder anxiety”)
• The passive voice, which evades responsibility (“Mistakes were made”)
• Long explanations and justifications of why something happened

While this research may not seem earth shattering, it’s helpful in emphasizing the importance of carefully crafting the language used in crisis communications. It’s a nice reminder that conveying confidence involves not only the substance of what you say, but how you say it. And that has ramifications for your organization’s reputation.

Photo Credit: Mix and Match Studio/Shutterstock

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