The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (2010) Overview: You will research and choose a public safety crisis where a critical decision was made; one that had a significant impact on life, property, or the en

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill (2010) Overview: You will research and choose a public safety crisis where a critical decision was made; one that had a significant impact on life, property, or the en 1

EMH380 – Crisis Decision Making

Annotated Bibliography

The Impact of Crisis Leadership During the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Name

EMH380: Crisis Decision Making

Post University

Professor first name, last name

September 11, 2024

The Impact of Crisis Leadership During the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Kanso, A. M., Nelson, R. A., & Kitchen, P. J. (2020). BP and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill: A case study of how company management employed public relations to restore a damaged brand. Journal of marketing communications, 26(7), 703-731.

This article considers BP’s crisis management and communication strategy, especially regarding the company’s attempts to manage its brand image after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. The authors, who specialize in marketing and communication, discuss BP’s actions in the crisis– media management, apologies, and actions toward rebranding. This source is useful to appreciate the politics of decision-making in crises to navigate public relations, much ado about leadership decisions on companies’ reputation. The article does an excellent job of mapping out BP’s PR communication model, but it lacks depth in terms of what communicative PR entails because it focuses on external communication and the absence of internal leadership. This is more so because, unlike other sources that analyze operations-based failures with crisis management, this analysis is more of a marketing and public relations perspective.

National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, & Offshore Dril (Eds.). (2011). Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling: Report to the President, January 2011: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling. Government Printing Office.

This report is an authoritative government document that provides a comprehensive analysis of the circumstances leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its outcomes. Leadership and regulatory failures constitute some of the primary reasons the commission identifies as leading to the disaster. A significant advantage of the report is that it presents a broad view of technical, managerial, and systemic factors that affected the crisis. It remains the platform through which one can have an idea of the effects of leadership in various critical situations. However, it is a government-commissioned document, so it might tend to pull out the role of regulations rather than highlight corporate responsibility. This source offers more objective insight into the events leading to the spill and the subsequent management of the crises, it is the most suitable among BP’s reports as it contains a critical analysis of the leadership mishaps.

Relihan, Q. (2020). Evaluation of United States Federal Oil Spill Policies: Deepwater Horizon vs. Bouchard B120.

This article by Relihan contrasts the response of the federal government to the BP Deepwater Horizon and Bouchard B120 oil spills and offers a study on policy efficiency as well as leadership choices in oppositional contexts. The author assesses the strengths and limitations of the U. S federal oil spill policies, failed leadership, and coordination in the response process as exposed by the event. This source can be of great relevance while studying the policy level and its impact on crisis management scenarios. It also highlights the need to develop leadership that can be applied in new emergent environments, the article is more of a policy review than a study of specific leaders or organizations, and in as much as the authors present new ideas, these may be seen of limited use by leadership scholars. This source provides a more inclusive policy view of the issue under consideration than the National Commission’s report, which helps supplement the leadership analysis conducted during the Deepwater Horizon occurrence.