Delivering Bad News in Organizations: Literature Review and Methodology

This literature review explores the impact of bad news on individuals and the delivery of bad news in organizations. It explains bad news, its impact on individuals, and the multiphase procedure for delivering bad news. The analysis covers strategic functions for delivering bad news, including scapegoating, building support and commitment, performance correction, and blame management. The methodology section discusses research philosophy, qualitative methodology, qualitative data collection techniques, sampling, access, and ethical considerations.

Literature review of a current
business concept and identification
of an appropriate methodology

Table of Content
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
PART 1............................................................................................................................................3
Explaining Bad News..................................................................................................................3
Impact of bad news on individuals.............................................................................................4
Delivery of Bad News: Multiphase procedure............................................................................4
Analysis of delivering bad news.................................................................................................5
PART 2............................................................................................................................................6
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Organisation generally has two types of mews such as bad news and good news. Bad news
generally influences the performance and growth of business whereas good news increases the
profitability and productivity of business. It is being identified that bad events are more powerful
as compared to good events which carries an implications for delivering bad news in
organisations (Bradley and Campbell, 2016). This project mainly includes the information which
helps in determining how bad news are delivered to employees. It also covers the strategic
functions considered by management in order to reduce the impact of negative response due to
delivery of bad news. The project also determines the various issues which can be faced by
manager while delivering bad news.
PART 1
When employees work in organisation they face various issues which can influence their
performance and efficiency. These issues can be bad or good. While working on company,
employees generally hear bad news that influences their morale and motivation level. As the
word bad represents harmful, undesirable and unpleasant due to which it includes negative
information. The few examples of bad news are bad customer service, termination of employees,
feedback from supervisors for negative performance and lay-offs of employees.
Explaining Bad News
Bad news represents unwelcome things that can damage the performance and
productivity of business. For example, in the world of medicine, bad news can be any
information that can be adversely influence the expectation for future. Bad news generally results
in behavioural, cognitive and emotional deficit in the individual receiving the news that persists
for some time after the news is received. Thus, bad news is the news that negatively and
drastically alter's the individuals view of the future. The bad news is subjectively determined and
also it perceived differently badness of news (Reason and Hobbs, 2017). Bad news mainly
contains the news that are bad for the organisation and opposite from the good news. There are
mainly two approaches of bad news that helps in avoiding priori definition of the construct of
bad news. The first approach is to identify the negative information that most people would
generally know it is bad news. For example, negative performance feedback, employee
termination and job layoffs. Another approach includes asking the respondent to define bad

news. It is an approach which is mainly found in qualitative studies of delivering bad news. The
example of this approach is blame management, refusal of request and routine bad news
provided by supervisors. Both the approach provides less attention for the definition of bad news.
Moreover, it is necessary to deliver the bad news so that organisation can make changes and
focuses on reducing the negative impact.
Impact of bad news on individuals
On individual there is a great impact of bad news as it can influence the morale and
motivation level of people due to which it becomes difficult to achieve the task in effective and
efficient manner. It is being identified from the given article that bad news or events are more
powerful rather than good news or events. In simple terms, bad news creates a negative impact
on the performance and efficiency of employees due to which they are not able to give their
productive output (Mather, P., 2020). Bad news generally creates a negative impact and
consequences on employees and organisation. It is being analysed that bad news are five times
powerful in comparison to good events.
Delivery of Bad News: Multiphase procedure
In society there are various professionals who delivers bad news such as doctors, law
enforcement officials and coroners. But in organisation generally the bad news are delivered by
managers so that employees can know about the news. In order to deliver the bad news, manager
can use multiphase process which mainly includes three phases such as preparation, delivery and
transition. In the first stage of multiphase process, manager give advance warning to staff and
also provide opportunity for sharing their ideas and opinions (Regnard, Kindlen and Nichol,
2018). In the second stage of multiphase procedure, the manager could provide appeal procedure
and also engage public relations. In the third stage of multiphase procedure, manger of
organisation focuses on providing appeal procedure and also engages public relations. Through
these multiphase procedures, manager can manage various bad news and run the business
activities in effective and efficient manner. By managing the bad news manager can focuses on
creating high sense of fairness, blame and less anger and also create higher approval of
individual providing the news.

Analysis of delivering bad news
It is the responsibility of manager to deliver bad news in workplace by adopting various
strategies and practices. By adopting strategic functions, manager can deliver the bad news and
ensure that the negative influence of bad news gets eliminated. There are various ways through
which manager can deliver bad news such as scapegoating, building support and commitment,
performance correction and blame management. Through these strategies organisation can focus
on delivering bad news in effective and efficient manner. Scapegoating is one of the way through
which organisation can deliver bad news as it removes the person who doesn’t give their bad
performance and responsible for failure and loss. Organisation can also focus on implementing
performance correction technique as it creates a paper trail and provide opportunity to employees
to offer factual foundation for the purpose of behavioural change. Blame management is also a
way through which company can deliver bad news to their staff as it helps in influencing the
casual judgement of receiver (Lin, 2021). Support and commitment is another way that helps in
delivering the bad news in effective and smooth manner as it helps in increasing the engagement
and collaboration level of employees due to which they collectively work together in order to
achieve the goals and objective of business and also focus on reducing the impact of bad news.

PART 2
Research methodology is a technique that is used by researcher to identify, process and
select the data about the specific field of topic. In the context of research, the methodology
section enables reader to evaluate overall validity and reliability. There are various types of
methodologies which are used and explained in effective manner.
Research Philosophy:
Research philosophy is one of the methodologies that help in identifying the effective
method through which data can be analysed in systematic manner. It is divided into three
different parts such as ontology, axiology and epistemology. In this research, the chosen
philosophy is epistemology philosophy as it helps in evaluating the data. Epistemology
philosophy is also categorised into three sub parts such as interpretivism, positivism and critical
realism (Bairagi and Munot, 2019). For this research, the researcher can use interpretivism
philosophy as it helps the researcher to analyse the qualitative information in effective and
efficient manner.
Qualitative Methodology:
Researcher generally uses qualitative methodology for collecting and analysing the
existing information of the source. Qualitative methodology mainly includes letters and diaries,
archival information, newspapers articles and postcards. The research has use qualitative
methodology as it helps in collecting the information with theoretical aspects.
Qualitative data collection technique:
Qualitative data collection technique is a way through which researcher can collect the
data in the form of theory and text. There are different types of qualitative data collection
techniques through which researcher can collect data such as diary studies, unstructured
interview, structured interview, focused group and many others (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2019). In
order to collect the effective information, researcher can use semi structure interview as it helps
in collecting the piece of information in efficient manner due to open ended questions.
Sampling:
It is another type of research methodology in which numbers of sample are taken among the
large population. Sampling is divided into two parts such as probability and non-probability
sampling. In this research, the researcher can use probability sampling as it doesn’t require any

specific respondent (Park, 2017). Organisation can use random employees without setting any
criteria in order to deliver bad news in effective way.
Access:
In order to conduct the research, it is necessary to have access of primary and secondary
data. Thus, for collecting the information from the managers and employees it is important to
have access from organisation.
Ethical considerations:
While collecting the information, the researcher must focus on the ethics. Moreover, it is the
responsibility of researcher to take permission for using confidential information and ensure that
the respondents don’t get harm while collecting the data (Flick, 2020) .
CONCLUSION
It is being concluded from the above information that it is necessary for company to deliver
the bad news so that employees can focus on their work and give their best performance in
improving the performance and growth of company. In this report various methodologies are
explained so that manager can use it in appropriate manner.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Bairagi, V. and Munot, M. V. eds., 2019. Research methodology: A practical and scientific
approach. CRC Press.
Bradley, G. L. and Campbell, A. C., 2016. Managing difficult workplace conversations: Goals,
strategies, and outcomes. International Journal of Business Communication. 53(4).
pp.443-464.
Flick, U., 2020. Introducing research methodology: thinking your way through your research
project. Sage.
Lin, Y., 2021. Legitimation strategies in corporate discourse: A comparison of UK and Chinese
corporate social responsibility reports. Journal of Pragmatics. 177. pp.157-169.
Mather, P., 2020. Leadership and governance in a crisis: some reflections on COVID-19. Journal
of Accounting & Organizational Change.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S .J., 2019. Provisional notes on decolonizing research methodology and
undoing its dirty history. Journal of Developing Societies. 35(4). pp.481-492.
Park, J., 2017. Knowledge production with Asia-centric research methodology. Comparative
Education Review. 61(4). pp.760-779.
Reason, J. and Hobbs, A., 2017. Managing maintenance error: a practical guide. CRC Press.
Regnard, C., Kindlen, M. and Nichol, T., 2018. Breaking difficult news. In Helping the Patient
with Advanced Disease (pp. 109-112). CRC Press.