Comparing apology to equivalent crisis response strategies: Clarifying apology's role and value in crisis communication
Section snippets
Literature review and research questions
Research has shown that crisis response strategies – what an organization says and does after a crisis – serve to protect a reputation after a crisis (e.g., Coombs & Holladay, 1996). Researchers have over-emphasized the use of apology/mortification as the “best” crisis response (e.g., Benoit, 1995; Benoit & Drew, 1997) and have used widely varying definitions of apology (Patel & Reinsch, 2003). At its core, an apology is marked by the organization accepting responsibility for the crisis and
Participants
Participants in the study were 167 undergraduate students from a Midwestern university. The ages ranged from 18 to 56 (M = 20, S.D. = 1.55). The participants were 45% female (n = 75) and 55% male (n = 92).
Design and materials
This study used four different response conditions: apology, compensation, sympathy, or information only. Participants read a series of three print news stories and completed the research instrument. Participants were randomly selected to receive only one of the four possible research conditions.
Only
Reliabilities
The reliability coefficients (Cronbach's alpha) were .84, .88, .90, and .76 for the Organization Reputation Scale, the anger scale, the account analysis scale, and the negative word-of-mouth scale, respectively. All represented acceptable reliability scores.
Manipulation checks
The study involved a manipulation of crisis response strategy. Four crisis responses were used: sympathy, compensation, apology, and information only. A series of one-way ANOVAs were run to check the response manipulation. For the item
Discussion
In general, respondents had similar reactions to sympathy, compensation, and apology response strategies. There was a main effect for response strategy for reputation and account acceptance. The follow-up analysis revealed that in both cases, the information only condition was responsible for the differences. Apology, sympathy, and compensation were all rated the same for scores on post-crisis reputation account acceptance, anger, and negative word-of-mouth intention. Contrary to the advice
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