Claudia Kitz and Heiko Breitsohl, together with Laurie Barclay, publish paper on “the delivery of bad news” in prestigious journal

Delivering bad news is one of the most challenging tasks for leaders. Recently, the popular press has been awash with examples reflecting poor bad news delivery, such as mass layoffs in the IT sector.

While many disciplines have been interested in understanding the delivery of bad news, different emphases across disciplines have resulted in independent silos of research that impeded scholarly and practical advancements. For example, there is lacking evidence on how to deliver bad news in the workplace.

In their interdisciplinary review, Claudia Kitz, Laurie Barclay, and Heiko Breitsohl review 685 articles and identified key challenges in the extant literature while also providing a path forward by showcasing key opportunities.

For example, Kitz et al. propose conceptualizing bad news delivery as a dialectic process that unfolds over time while they summarize evidence-based practical recommendations on how to deliver bad news effectively. In sum, their research enhances theoretical insights and practical guidance for effectively managing bad news delivery in the workplace.

The review was published on May 24, 2023, in the prestigious journal Human Resource Management Review and is available as an open-access publication at https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S1053-4822(23)00022-0.