More than Fashion: Nostalgia’s Rose-Colored Glasses for Crisis and Interpersonal Emotion Management

Abstract: Organizations frequently face crises that threaten their functioning, stability, and survival, necessitating effective crisis management strategies. While leadership has been extensively studied in this domain, emotional aspects of crisis management remain underexplored, particularly how leaders use discrete emotions to navigate crises. This conceptual paper introduces the role of nostalgia—defined as a sentimental longing for the past—in leader crisis communication. We theorize that leaders can strategically employ nostalgia to foster sensemaking, evoke positive emotions, and drive collective action. Nostalgia, as discourse, provides leaders with a powerful rhetorical tool to influence followers’ affect, attitudes, and behaviors during crises. By juxtaposing a stable, idealized past against an uncertain present, nostalgia can help restore organizational equilibrium through increased optimism, motivation, and cooperation. This paper extends the literature on leadership and crisis management by offering a nuanced understanding of nostalgia’s potential as a conflict management tool, with practical implications for navigating organizational adversity.

Keywords: nostalgia, crisis management, leader emotion rhetoric, conceptual