The Role of Crisis Leadership and Organisational Learning in Social Media Crisis Preparedness
Keywords:
Crisis Leadership, Social Media, Crisis Management, Organizational Learning, Pre-mortem Analysis, Crisis PreparednessAbstract
The proliferation of social media has fundamentally changed organisational crisis landscapes, achieving unprecedented vulnerabilities. The social media crisis management market, valued at USD 1.88 billion in 2023, is expected to grow at significant rates. Despite this investment and demand for speed, organisations are still open to rapid reputational damage. Thus, the development of technological scale has far exceeded the development of existing response capabilities, and teams find themselves under disproportionate pressure. The aim of this study was to examine how crisis leadership competencies influence social media risk mitigation in organisations, and to explore whether competitor crisis analysis strengthens organisational preparedness for social media crises. The specific research objectives were, to analyze the relationship between specific anticipatory crisis leadership competencies and the depth and formality of organizational learning processes following competitor crisis analysis. To evaluate the mediating role of organizational learning in the causal pathway between crisis-led competitor analysis/pre-mortem exercises and the implementation of measurable, proactive changes to social media crisis strategy. To quantify the correlation between crisis leadership-facilitated pre-mortem simulations and objective metrics of decision-making performance in simulated or real social media crisis events. The study methodology was quantitative with a positivist research philosophy. The study sample was 150 participants. Primary data was collected using a structured questionnaire. Data was analysed using SPSS version 25. Ethical considerations were observed in the study. Results show that Pre-mortem analysis was the most significant predictor of crisis preparedness (β =.336, p < .001). A positive effect was also significant with crisis leadership competencies (β =.279, p =.001). Organisational learning was positively and statistically significantly correlated with crisis preparedness (β =.209, p =.030). The Study concluded that crisis leadership competencies have a strong impact on organisational preparedness. Practically, the findings are of significance to organisations who would want to enhance their crisis preparedness capacity.
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