LEADERSHIP SILENCE LATENCY: A NOVEL CONSTRUCT FOR EXPLAINING EMPLOYEE TRUST RECOVERY IN ORGANISATIONAL CRISIS COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Crisis communication scholarship has grown substantially,

generating extensive knowledge about what leaders should say during

organisational crises, most notably through the long-running debate between

transparency and strategic ambiguity as competing message strategies. Yet this

literature has largely overlooked an important dimension of leader behaviour

that has been neither conceptually developed nor empirically tested: the timing

of leader communication, that is, the interval during which a leader remains

silent before speaking. This article introduces Leadership Silence Latency

(LSL), a new latent construct describing the duration and placement of a

leader's non-response during an unfolding organisational crisis. Rather than

treating silence as an empty interval that precedes "real"

communication, LSL conceptualises silence itself as a communicative act, one

capable of shaping the stakeholder trust trajectory independently of, and in

interaction with, whatever message eventually follows. We propose a four-phase

research programme: conceptual work that distinguishes leader-attributed from

organisation-attributed silence; a multi-sector case corpus study coding real

crisis timelines across corporate, healthcare, and education settings for

trust, reputation, and sentiment outcomes as continuous trajectories rather

than pre/post snapshots; a controlled experimental study that manipulates

silence duration, attribution, and crisis type, including AI-failure crises;

and a cross-cultural moderation study testing whether high-context and

low-context communication norms shape whether silence is read as respectful

deliberation or as evasion. Together, these four phases supply the three components

reviewers typically require to certify a genuinely new theoretical

contribution: a new construct, a new measurement approach, and a specified set

of boundary conditions. We close with the anticipated theoretical,

methodological, and practical contributions of the LSL framework, including an

evidence-based model for how leaders and organisations might strategically

manage silence during a crisis.