Role of storytelling in communicating information within public-listed companies in Malaysia

The digitalisation and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have reshaped how we communicate in an organisation. Due to these, public relations encompasses the characteristics of advanced public relations in the 21st century and its growing strategic importance to businesses. The challenges faced by this discipline include measuring the results of communication, the profession's ethics, and the profession's globalisation. One of the public relations core purposes is to inform employees of the company's strategy. Using storytelling to communicate information, particularly a company's strategy and vision, can significantly impact people in a meaningful or harmful way. The study's purpose was to explore the role of storytelling in communicating information from the perspective of public relations professionals, namely those who work for publicly listed companies in Malaysia. This study's aim was achieved using a qualitative phenomenological approach, where ten public relations professionals were interviewed up to the data saturation point. Accordingly, an interview guide aided in the interview procedure, which was captured using digital voice recorders. The data were transcribed verbatim and organised into groups to generate codes, categories, and themes. According to the study findings, public relations professionals employed five unique definitions of an organisation's storytelling when communicating information. Numerous variables, including the characteristic of organisational storytelling, such as a narrative message, part of a brand experience and culture, recounting corporate history, and touching people's emotions, have affected the growth of storytelling in these modern public relations. This study also found that public relations practitioners within publicly listed companies in Malaysia used both official and unofficial stories throughout the organisation based on their personal experience. Meanwhile, in terms of communicating corporate goals, the elements of storytelling, such as multiple channels, management values and culture, and techniques used to create a good story, are used. Storytelling by public relations practitioners in publicly listed companies showed the greatest support for communicating corporate strategy. This study showed a crucial contribution of public relations practitioners as employees play a major role in the organisation’s collective sensemaking process by narrating supportive or harmful stories. Theoretically, based on the sensemaking theory, storytelling facilitates the transition to informed decision-making within organisations by providing an integrative conceptual framework and suggesting a better direction on how storytelling in internal communication can support or undermine corporate strategy. This study's implication will help and make it possible to negotiate an agreement to increase storytelling's significance and strategies, allowing public relations managers to determine which communication strategies work best for business strategy and preparing the organisation for change. Practically, the conceptual model could help organisations, especially Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), Government-Linked Corporations (GLCs), and other private and public sectors, find, adapt, and create a guideline for designing and building comprehensive and effective internal storytelling programmes for public relations and corporate communication specialists.

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