The role of empathy in crisis communication: Providing a deeper understanding of how organizational crises and crisis communication affect reputation

Abstract

This study advances our theoretical knowledge of how organizational crises and crisis communication affect reputation. Prior research solely emphasizes the importance of organizational crisis responsibility in this process. Three experiments show that stakeholders' empathy toward the organization provides a second explanation. The first two experiments demonstrate that victim crises not only inflict less reputational damage than preventable crises because stakeholders consider the organization less responsible for the events, but also because they are more likely to empathize with the company. The third study shows that empathy can also explain the outcomes of crisis communication. An apology arouses empathy among stakeholders and subsequently increases reputation repair, unlike denial. The role of empathy in the crisis communication process has implications for both theory and practice.

Relational immunity? Examining relationship as crisis shield

“…Contextualizing student–university relationships in the communal realm suggests a particular level of influence for blame and empathy. Recent research has shown that blame and empathy are interconnected in influencing post‐crisis reputation (Schoofs, Claeys, De Waele, & Cauberghe, 2019), but this study shows their influence on post‐crisis relationships as well. Given the mutual orientation, it is likely that blame and empathy would both have considerable influence, as this study's findings suggest.…”

Exploring the influence of stakeholder personality on crisis response evaluations and outcomes

“…For example, Schoofs et al. (2019) noted the influence of stakeholders’ empathy on organizational crisis communication outcomes, finding that the empathy generated by the apology strategy improves reputation repair more than the denial strategy. Furthermore, Claeys et al.…”

The Influence of Heuristic judgments in Social Media on Corporate Reputation: A Study in Spanish Leader Companies

“…On the other hand, reputation is structural; it projects the corporate identity as a whole, it generates value, and it can be measured objectively [29]. Several authors point out that reputation is one of the main conditions of business leadership [36][37][38][39].…”

“…For this reason, they are very interested to disseminate relevant information in social media and press in order to answer to the decision-making needs for shareholders and stakeholders. When communication and positive information on companies impact on the expectations of managers and stakeholders, their corporate reputation is likely to increase [35,36].…”

“…Today, considerable confusion surrounds the question of how to delimit the concept of reputation so it can be used as a measurement tool for the company [36]. Three reasons underlie this difficulty.…”