Relationship matters: How government organization-public relationship impacts disaster recovery outcomes among multiethnic communities*

Government and emergency management (EM) agencies play a leading role in managing natural disasters. However, it is less well understood how the quality of the relationship between government and various publics may impact long-term disaster-coping and recovery outcomes. Extending the relationship management framework to the context of disaster management, the current study tests the relationships among different ethnic publics' OPR quality, their communicative behaviors of seeking government and EM information, and disastercoping outcomes. Results suggest that government OPR quality is positively related to information seeking and major disaster-coping outcomes, including self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and community resilience perceptions. Moreover, the extent to which OPR quality impacts disaster-coping outcomes significantly diverges across ethnic lines. Results provide implications for multicultural relationship management in the context of postdisaster recovery and community building.