A Narrative Approach to Delivering Bad News in Organizations: Effective or Not?

Purpose: This paper presents empirical evidence for the use of narrative to deliver bad news within an organization, specifically bad news about layoffs. The attempt is to extend previous empirical work, using narrative by senior leadership to convey corporate strategy, to a different leadership challenge and further explicate a model for understanding the effectiveness of narrative as a leadership communication tool. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper presents further original research on the effectiveness of narrative as a leadership tool. And theoretical implications for leaders seeking effective communication tools are explored. Findings: Data presented to substantiate that narrative use, as opposed to a PowerPoint style, bulleted list approach, for delivering bad news, an impending layoff, is not effective at producing a clear understanding of the reasons for the layoff, confidence i