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.