Crisis-Induced Service Decline Rationalization (CISDR): Reconfiguring Organizational Frontlines in Extreme Contexts

Service quality and crisis communication are central to how organizations navigate extreme contexts, yet crisis conditions often expose weaknesses in frontline delivery and messaging. We investigate how businesses rationalize service reductions during crises and how these decisions shape public perceptions of fairness, trust, and legitimacy, especially when reductions are viewed as opportunistic behavior rather than necessary operational adjustments. We introduce the concept of crisis-induced service decline rationalization, which refers to the use of crisis language to justify sustained reductions in service availability, quality, or transparency. We further examine consumer responses to this practice. Drawing on thematic, sentiment, and emotion analyses of public commentary on social media ( N = 2,371), we identified four key themes: (1) inconsistent frontline policies and communication , (2) perceived opportunism in frontline service reductions , (3) operational failures and declining frontline reliability , and (4) customer frustration with frontline access and experience constraints . Grounded in situational crisis communication theory and supported by stakeholder theory and legitimacy theory, we identify four corresponding frontline mismatches (rule–coherence, motive, capability–promise, and access–fairness) that help explain how crisis enactments may be interpreted through specific consumer attributions and emotional responses. These micro-level mismatches may accumulate into macro-level risks to trust and legitimacy. We advance new, mechanism-based propositions on how specific frontline missteps are associated with motive, competence, and fairness attributions that shape stakeholder relationships, offering both theoretical extensions and practical guidance via actionable mitigation protocols and legitimacy-monitoring metrics for managing organizational frontlines during high-stress disruptions. The study responds to calls for crisis-driven service research that centers on consumer distrust, perceived opportunism, perceived injustice, and well-being to advance understanding of frontline service management in extreme contexts.