When a chief executive officer (CEO) or spokesperson responds to an organizational crisis, he or she communicates not only with verbal cues but also visual and vocal cues. While most research in the area of crisis communication has focused on verbal cues (e.g., apologies, denial), this paper explores the relative importance of visual and vocal cues by spokespersons of organizations in crisis. Two experimental studies have more specifically examined the impact of a spokesperson's visual cues of deception (i.e., gaze aversion, posture shifts, adaptors), because sending a credible response is crucial in times of crisis. Each study focused on the interplay of these visual cues with two specific vocal cues that have also been linked to perceptions of deception (speech disturbances in study 1; voice pitch in study 2).Both studies show that visual cues of deception negatively affect both consumers' attitudes towards the organization (study 1) and their purchase intentions (study 2) after a crisis. In addition, the findings indicate that in crisis communication, the impact of visual cues dominates the outcomes of vocal cues. In both studies, vocal cues only affected consumers' perceptions when the spokesperson displayed visual cues of deception. More specifically, the findings show that crisis communication messages with speech disturbances (study 1) or a raised voice pitch (study 2) can negatively affect organizational post-crisis perceptions.

This study examines how both the content (i.e., denial vs. apology) and the verb voice (i.e., active voice vs. passive voice) of a crisis response affect the public's perception of crisis responsibility and, subsequently, the reputation of an organization accused of wrongdoing. The results of two experiments first show that an apology results in higher responsibility attributions than denial, which, in turn, adversely affects an organization's reputation. When we consider the verb voice of the message, a crisis response that is constructed in the passive voice reduces responsibility perceptions more than the active voice, leading to less reputational damage. An interaction effect shows, however, that this result only holds true for a passive denial strategy and not for apologies. As such, when an organization needs to deny an accusation, it seems wise to construct the message in the passive voice in order to strengthen the denial and effectively protect the organizational reputation.

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