Public Relations, Stakeholder Trust and Crisis Communication: Lessons from Turbulent Business Environments in Kenya

Abstract

Organisations in Kenya operate amid regulatory shocks, currency and price volatility, political contestation and digitally amplified scrutiny. In such conditions public relations (PR) is less a publicity function than a boundary-spanning capability through which firms earn, protect and repair stakeholder trust. This paper makes a theoretical and methodological contribution. First, it integrates strategic PR, stakeholder salience, the ability-benevolence-integrity model of trust, situational crisis communication theory and legitimacy theory into one framework with seven structural hypotheses and one serial indirect-effect hypothesis. Second, it specifies a five-phase explanatory-exploratory sequential mixed-methods protocol covering case selection, instrument design, sampling, analytic decision rules and trustworthiness criteria. Third, it supports the protocol with computed power analyses for multiple regression and a Monte Carlo study of indirect-effect power: 385 stakeholder responses give power of .93 for f² = .05 and about .80 for a small-to-medium mediated effect. Fourth, it translates the framework into a time-phased crisis communication protocol for practitioners. No primary field data are reported; figures labelled stylised or illustrative are theory-derived, and the power and simulation results are computational. The framework is intended to guide empirical work in Kenya and comparable emerging economies.