Ethics in Crisis Management
Instructor Resources
Overview
This module explores the ethical dimensions of crisis communication and management. It examines how crises can disrupt normal operations, endanger public safety, and damage an organization’s reputation, emphasizing the importance of responsibility, accountability, and humanistic care in response efforts. The module also addresses the ethical challenges surrounding access to information, including the need to ensure stakeholders have a significant choice in decision-making while balancing the realities of information uncertainty and the potential necessity of withholding or delaying communication during a crisis.
Presentation Files
Lesson 1:
A crisis can interrupt an organization’s routine business, bring threats to public safety or lead to financial and reputation loss. This lesson addresses prominent ethical issues in crisis situations. They include responsibility and accountability, and the ethics of humanistic care. These issues are almost always present in various types of crisis situations and have significant consequences.
Learning objectives
- Students will understand responsibility and accountability as closely related ethical concept
- Students will understand humanistic care as an ethical standard relevant to many crisis situations
- Students will comprehend the connection between image restoration and accepting responsibility in crisis communication and response
Key concepts
Crisis Communication; Accepting or denying/evading responsibility (for crisis event); accountability for one’s action; humanitarian care (for victims of crisis)
Lesson 2:
A crisis is an unexpected event/situation that can potentially cause severe damage to an organization or the public. Crisis management is designed to protect an organization and its stakeholders from threats and/or reduce the impact of the threats. This lesson addresses the important ethical issue of access to information during a crisis. The concepts of significant choice for stakeholders is discussed, as well as the challenges of information uncertainty and ambiguity. Then the lesson discusses the ethical question of withholding communication or temporarily delaying information release during a crisis.
Learning objectives
- Students will understand access to information as an ethical obligation
- Students will comprehend the importance of being open and honest for organization reputation even though uncertainty and ambiguity exist
- Students will discuss the ethical considerations of the possibility for withholding information or postponing information release
- Students will apply the above concepts to crisis cases and evaluate the crisis management decisions with ethical standards
Key concepts
Significant choice ethical framework; information uncertainty; communication ambiguity; ethics of withholding information
Module Developer
Dr. Janice H. Xu
Associate Professor, Holy Family University
Janice H. Xu (Ph.D. in communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is associate professor of Communication at Holy Family University, Pennsylvania. Prior to college teaching in the U.S., she worked as lecturer of international communication in Peking University in China, news assistant at New York Times Beijing Bureau, and radio broadcaster at Voice of America, Washington DC. She has published journal articles and book chapters on grassroots activism, technology in public relations, and digital divide. She serves as external reviewer for Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, and has provided research work for US District Court Southern District of New York as expert witness.
She may be reached at jxu@holyfamily.edu.