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Breaking The Sound Of Silence: Explication In The Use Of Strategic Silence In Crisis Communication, Pang, A., Yan Jin, Youngji Seo, Sung In Choi, Hui-Xun Teo, Phuong D. Le, Bryan Reber

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Crises present organizations with the “rhetorical exigency” to enact control. Silence is not an option. This study, as the first empirical examination of Le et al’s (2019) seminal study on silence in crisis communication, examines, first, if silence can be strategically used as a bona fide strategy; second, under what circumstances should silence be broken; and third, when silence is broken, how it affects (a) organizational reputation, (b) societal risk perception, and (c) the publics’ crisis information sharing intention. An online experiment was conducted using a nationally representative sample in the United States. Participants were recruited in 2019 via a …