Comparing apology to equivalent crisis response strategies: Clarifying apology's role and value in crisis communication

Crisis communication has begun to systematically examine how people perceive the crisis response strategies using experimental designs. This is an important step in the evolution of crisis communication research. One problem with this research has been the over promotion of apology as “the” response. Too often the value of an apology is established by comparing how people react to an apology and to other less victim-centered/accommodative responses. This “unfair” comparison results in apology appearing to be “the” best alternative. This study compares apology to more equivalent crisis response strategies to more fairly determine if apology is “the” best strategy. The results show that people react similarly to any victim-centered/accommodative strategy meaning apology is not “the” best strategy. The implications of the results for crisis managers are discussed.     

Empathy as a main ingredient of impactful crisis communication: The perspectives of crisis communication practitioners

Sixteen in-depth interviews with Belgian crisis communication practitioners were conducted to get their perspectives on the role of empathy in crisis communication. While demonstrating empathy toward crisis-affected stakeholders is considered an essential best practice, the role of empathy in responding to crises has only received limited attention in research. The aims of this study were to examine how practitioners interpret the concept of empathy in crisis communication; to what extent they value the expression of empathy in crisis responses and for what reasons; and what exactly constitutes an empathetic crisis response according to them. In addition, instances in which stakeholders may in turn experience empathy for organizations in crisis were examined. As such, the aspiration behind this study was to provide insights that can initiate further theorization and research on the role of empathy in the context of organizational crisis communication.     

The crisis communication preparedness of nonprofit organizations: The case of German interest groups

A national survey of German interest groups showed that these nonprofit organizations are substantially lacking crisis preparations. Less than one third use crisis plans, crisis management teams, or crisis scenarios. In terms of web-based crisis communication, nonprofit organizations primarily relied on traditional forms of online communication for crisis response. Organizational experience with crises, the general status of the public relations function, as well as the crisis communication expertise of practitioners were positively related to the degree of crisis preparedness of these interest groups.     

Proxy communication in crisis response

This study analyzes the role of third party crisis communication during the expansive food contamination crisis caused by Peanut Corporation of America (PCA). The information void caused by PCA's mismanagement of the crisis and subsequent reticence was filled by third party organizations serving as proxy crisis communicators. The need for organizations to plan for and engage in proxy communication when organizations in affiliated industries fail to communicate effectively during crises is demonstrated.     

The parallel power in organizations’ defense: Exploring faith-holders and their crisis communication

Publics can be active participants of discussions around organizational crises. Through digital media, they can provide information about a crisis, criticize crisis participants or defend the organization experiencing the crisis (Coombs & Holladay, 2014). Limited research exists on the active role of publics in defending the organization. A handful of studies have looked at crisis communication of active organization supporters, including faith-holders (Luoma-aho, 2015); however there is a limited amount of public relations scholarship about the nature of faith-holders, their communication under crisis circumstances, and whether they in fact attempt to help organizations in times of crisis. By using a combination of content analysis and rhetorical analysis, this paper examined the crisis communication strategies offered by the organization’s faith-holders in the comments to the crisis-related articles published on the websites of media outlets. Through a case study of Tesla Motors’ crisis, the paper determined that faith-holders are a powerful force in defending the organization during the crisis, using both traditional reputation repair strategies identified by Coombs (2015) as well as new strategies identified by the study. Faith-holders were not a monolithic group and differed in terms of what aspects of the organization they had faith. Their communication was not restricted by legal and ethical demands. The results provide insights into understanding of faith-holders’ communication during crises, and also highlight the need for reconsidering the situational crisis communication theory in respect to organizations' faith-holders.     

How financial crisis history informs ethical corporate communication: Insights from corporate communication leaders

This study explored how financial crisis history can inform corporate crisis communication practice across industries and over time. Thirty-eight interviews with chief communications officers (CCOs) and their counselors were conducted to explore what lasting lessons these corporate communication leaders learned from their crisis communication practice during the 2008 Financial Crisis. Key lessons learned include: 1) the importance for corporations to tailor their financial communication strategies according to victim vs. perpetrator perception and ethical response expectations held by stakeholders; 2) the importance of stakeholders, and employees in particular, when creating and implementing the plan; 3) the balance between speed and legal concerns, as well as the need for reducing complexity by making sure stakeholder communications are delivered with clarity and accessibility; and 4) a recipe for success includes honesty, transparency, trust/integrity, taking action to reform questionable practices, and abiding by one’s own personal morals. Insights from this study shed light on how learning contributes to ethical corporate communication practice in times of crisis and crisis spillover.     

Making nice may not matter: The interplay of crisis type,response type and crisis issue on perceived organizational responsibility

Experimental findings suggest limited effects for corporate social responsibility (CSR) to inoculate a company prior to a crisis. CSR may be viewed as accommodative window dressing that diminishes resources to assure corporate competence. When an accident occurs, emphasis in crisis communication on corporate ability (CA) may be more effective than CSR, especially when corporate culpability is low.     

Explicating crisis coping in crisis communication

This study explores coping, a core construct in the cognitive appraisal theory of crisis communication, from the public's perspective. The study proposed and tested the hierarchical framework of publics’ crisis coping that examined the relationship among four types of publics’ crisis coping strategies (i.e., relational thinking, emotional venting, instrumental support, and action). For this purpose, a survey was conducted among 168 individuals from a randomly sampled general public population. The proposed model of crisis coping illustrates tenable data-model fits. Key findings of this study include direct effects of rational thinking on action as well as indirect effects of emotional venting on action through instrumental support. The results shed light on the essential coping facilitator role organizations could play in terms of providing publics with instrumental support in times of crisis and facilitate more constructive public responses in the organizational crisis-handling process.     

Effects of crisis efficacy on intentions to follow directives during crisis

Self-efficacy has consistently been a useful predictor of behavioral intentions as a construct in many theories; yet, its role in audience adherence to instructing information during crisis is relatively unexplored. A national survey (N = 454) examines self-efficacy in public response to crisis directives and develops the concept of crisis efficacy as an important area for future research. In three crisis contexts (food-borne illness, weather emergency, and public health disease threat), crisis efficacy, along with several demographics, significantly predicted public response to instructing information. Crisis efficacy emerges as a construct with great potential to inform message design in crisis communication.     

Taxonomy of mediated crisis responses

This paper examines how organizations integrate the Internet into crisis communication. The findings of a 7-year longitudinal study provide a taxonomy explaining how mediated communication creates new possibilities for crisis response. We translate the study findings into suggestions for how public relations managers can integrate new communication media into their mix of communication tactics in crisis and risk management.     

Tracking the defining moments of crisis process and practice

Crisis holds the potential for profound change in organizations and industries. The past 50 years of crisis management highlight key shifts in crisis practice, creating opportunities for multiple theories and research tracks. Defining crises such as Tylenol, Exxon Valdez, and September 11 terrorist attacks have influenced or challenged the principles of best practice of crisis communication in public relations. This study traces the development of crisis process and practice by identifying shifts in crisis research and models and mapping these against key management theories and practices. The findings define three crisis domains: crisis planning, building and testing predictive models, and mapping and measuring external environmental influences. These crisis domains mirror but lag the evolution of management theory, suggesting challenges for researchers to reshape the research agenda to close the gap and lead the next stage of development in the field of crisis communication for effective organizational outcomes.     

The state of crisis communication research and education through the lens of crisis scholars: An international Delphi study

This Delphi study explores the status of crisis communication research and education qualitatively through the lens of 22 internationally recognized crisis communication scholars, systematically recruited and retained to serve on the crisis expert Delphi panel in a two-year span. Taking a multi-iteration consensus-building approach, this study enabled the expert panel to individually elaborate and collectively evaluate shared observations and insights regarding trends, patterns, and nuances in crisis communication as a unique interdisciplinary area of research and practice. The quality and impact of current scholarship, methodological rigor and diversity, and perceived knowledge gaps between academia and industry were compared and synthesized across countries. Consensus was achieved in the majority of the proposed questions. Results show challenges and particular deficiencies within the crisis communication research domain. The main challenge is bridging the gap between academia and industry. The lack of theory development and cross-cultural studies contribute to part of this challenge. The knowledge and perceptual gaps identified by our Delphi expert panel also suggest a need to align crisis communication academic research more closely with crisis communication teaching. Despite the increasingly broadened presence of crisis communication scholarship, it remains small and stunted at some universities. The discussions and insights that emerged in this Delphi study help pave the way for further research innovation and educational program development in crisis communication.     

Consumer health crisis management: Apple's crisis responsibility for iPod-related hearing loss

This study used a content analysis of Apple's lawsuit concerning hearing loss, exploring how for-profit organizations manage health-related crises when products are suspected of having a potentially devastating impact on consumers’ health. By integrating two major approaches in a crisis communication, this study found that severity of damage, locus of control, business size, and the external public's claim were major contingent factors generating the organization's responsibility for consumer health crises.     

An exploration of the effects of victim visuals on perceptions and reactions to crisis events

How news media and organizations use visual images in reports of crisis events remains relatively unexplored in spite of possible effects on perceptions of crisis responsibility and reputation. This study assessed the impact of visual condition (no visual, neutral visual, and victim visual) in two product harm crisis scenarios. Results revealed minimal effects for victim visuals. Implications for future research on visual elements and crisis communication are presented.     

Getting emotional: An emotion-cognition dual-factor model of crisis communication

The effect of emotional experience on cognitive processes is an under-explored phenomenon in crisis communication research, despite indications of the increasing importance of emotion-based communication in the digital era. Emerging evidence indicates that the emotional experiences of publics play a critical role during organizational crises and determine the degree to which organizations are able to successfully devise communications that help them deal with such crises. Yet no comprehensive, theoretically sound model exists for analyzing how emotions influence the cognitive processing of crisis information. Our study proposes just such a model, capable of describing how cognition and emotion, separately or interactively, influence the publics’ processing of crisis information and consequently their attitudes and behaviors. Our model describes how emotional variables determine whether the publics take a cognition-oriented approach or an emotion-oriented approach to information processing and subsequent formation of interpretations, evaluations, and judgments directed toward organizations. Moreover, our model explains how an emotion-to-cognition assessment of publics’ attitudes is possible and makes a case for how it is critical for predicting and influencing the publics’ behavior during organizational crises. The hope is that this model will aid practitioners and academics in understanding why the publics’ emotions matter during crisis communication as well as how to craft more effective communication strategies as a result. Finally, several avenues for future research are suggested in order to test the validity of our conceptual model in different contexts.     

Emotional crisis communication

Organizational crises are usually highly emotional experiences for both organizations and stakeholders. Hence, crisis situations often result in emotionally charged communication between the two parties. Despite the attention of organizations and scholars to the emotions of stakeholders during crises, little is known about the effects of the emotions communicated by organizations on corporate reputations. Through the use of vignettes, this experiment reveals that besides crisis-response strategy (diminish vs. rebuild), the communicated emotion (i.e., shame and regret) has a positive effect on corporate reputation. Mediation analyses showed that this effect of communicated emotion could be explained by the public's (negative) affective as well as cognitive responses (i.e., account acceptance). This study confirms that emotional signals embedded in crisis responses may affect corporate reputations by reducing feelings of anger and by increasing the acceptance of the organizational message. In doing so, this study provides a starting point for further exploration of the effectiveness of other emotions in crisis communication.     

Media manipulation in the Sanlu milk contamination crisis

This study analyzes crisis communication strategies in a transitioning media environment, specifically, Sanlu Group's crisis communication strategies during a quality control crisis in China. Analysis reveals Sanlu manipulated its relationships with local Chinese government and media to reduce media coverage and online searches regarding the contamination of infant milk formula. The case provides evidence that media can be pressured into manipulating information flow through both traditional and online media and suggests a need for additional research on crisis communication in transitioning media environments.     

Does severity matter?: An investigation of crisis severity from defensive attribution theory perspective

Although the concept of crisis severity has existed in the crisis communication literature for two decades, it has not been theoretically tested and explained. Based on Defensive Attribution Theory (DAT), this study intends to specify the relationship between crisis severity and crisis responsibility as well as organizational reputation within the SCCT model. Through a 2 (crisis severity) × 3 (crisis type) between-subject factorial experiment (n?=?274), the study revealed that higher crisis severity causes worse reputation regardless of crisis type. For accidental crisis, higher crisis severity leads to higher intentionality, one dimension of crisis responsibility. The findings indicate that crisis severity still has value in SCCT and deserves further investigation.     

Through the looking glass: A decade of Red Cross crisis response and situational crisis communication theory

Crisis communication has emerged as a hot topic in public relations literature. However, little attention has been paid to nonprofit organizations (NPOs), one of the largest sectors of public relations practice. In particular, few studies have examined that the crisis response strategy NPOs can employ to repair their reputations. For the Red Cross and other NPOs, when faced with a crisis, communicating with their publics is critical to restore a positive reputation and, ultimately, to the continued success of the organization once the crisis has passed.     

Factors that influence organisational crisis perception from an internal stakeholder’s point of view

This paper starts from the premise that crisis is a perception and that one of the best ways to conquer a crisis is not to allow it to develop in the first place. By detecting or perceiving a crisis before other stakeholders do, an organisation can prevent or mitigate a crisis. Few studies have considered the question of whether organisations put the right people in the right places to be able to see a crisis coming. Within an organisation, managers are usually well placed to take decisions to initiate crisis communication, but they seem to be reluctant to do so or may not wish to see an impending crisis. Communication professionals should have a better perception of a crisis, but they rarely find themselves in a position to have a substantial impact on the management decision to communicate during a crisis. In this paper, we study crisis perception by individuals in a large governmental organisation during various stages of an unfolding crisis and compared perception scores to individual profiles based on study background, professional situation and crisis experience. This study involves a large-scale scenario-driven survey with ‘crisis perception’ as the main dependent variable. The results of this specific case indicate that an academic communication degree, a high hierarchical position in the organisation and crisis experience are positively related to an augmented perception of an impending organisational crisis.