A Discursive Analysis of Crisis Response Strategies in CEO Apologies—Drawing on Linguistic Insights from the Appraisal Framework

Abstract

When corporations are confronted with a crisis, well-crafted CEO apologies can serve to repair, restore, and rebuild a damaged corporate image. In prior research, the use of linguistic resources exhibited in CEO corporate apology discourse for different crisis response strategies has not been sufficiently examined. Drawing on the appraisal framework and subsumed linguistic resources, this study analyzed the discursive construction of crisis response strategies in the corporate apology discourse of leading companies listed in the Fortune Global 2000. The findings revealed an integrated use of crisis response strategies in which attitude appraisal resources predominated, while different types of appraisal resources were deployed in various crisis response strategies to achieve rhetorical persuasion in corporate communication. The proposed framework integrating crisis response strategies in CEO apology discourse with appraisal resources could guide CEOs and crisis communicators to use the right words when composing corporate apologies.

Keywords

crisis response strategy corporate apology appraisal framework discursive analysis

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Afifi

W. A.

(2007). Nonverbal communication. In Whaley

B. B.

Samter

(Eds.), Explaining communication: Contemporary theories and exemplars (pp. 39–62). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Austin

Jin

(2018). Social media and crisis communication. Routledge.

Barnett

M. L.

Jermier

J. M.

Lafferty

B. A.

(2006). Corporate reputation: The definitional landscape. Corporate Reputation Review, 9(1), 26–38. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.crr.1550012

Benoit

W. L.

(1995). Accounts, excuses, and apologies: A theory of image restoration strategies. State University of New York Press.

Benoit

W. L.

(2015). Accounts, excuses, apologies: Image repair theory and research (2nd ed.). State University of New York Press.

Benoit

W. L.

(2018). Crisis and image repair at United Airlines: Fly the unfriendly skies. Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research, 1(1), 11–26. https://doi.org/10.30658/jicrcr.1.1.2

Bentley

J. M.

(2018). What counts as an apology? Exploring stakeholder perceptions in a hypothetical organizational crisis. Management Communication Quarterly, 32(2), 202–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318917722635

Blum-Kulka

Levenston

E. A.

(1987). Lexical-grammatical pragmatic indicators. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 9(2), 155–170. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263100000450

Coombs

W. T.

(1995). Choosing the right words: The development of guidelines for the selection of the “Appropriate” crisis response strategies. Management Communication Quarterly, 8(4), 447–476. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318995008004003

10.

Coombs

W. T.

(2007). Protecting organization reputations during a crisis: The development and application of situational crisis communication theory. Corporate Reputation Review, 10(3), 163–176. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.crr.1550049

11.

Coombs

W. T.

(2010). Pursuing evidence-based crisis communication. In Coombs

W. T.

Holladay

S. J.

(Eds.), The handbook of crisis communication (pp. 719–725). Wiley-Blackwell.

12.

Coombs

W. T.

Holladay

S. J.

(2002). Helping crisis managers protect reputational assets: Initial tests of the situational crisis communication theory. Management Communication Quarterly, 16(2), 165–186. https://doi.org/10.1177/089331802237233

13.

Coombs

W. T.

Holladay

S. J.

(2005). An exploratory study of stakeholder emotions: Affect and crises. Research on Emotion in Organizations, 1(5), 263–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1746-9791(05)01111-9

14.

Coombs

W. T.

Holladay

S. J.

(2008). Comparing apology to equivalent crisis response strategies: Clarifying apology’s role and value in crisis communication. Public Relations Review, 34(3), 252–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2008.04.001

15.

DeSteno

Petty

Rucker

Wegener

Braverman

(2004). Discrete emotions and persuasion: The role of emotion-induced expectancies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(1), 43–56. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.86.1.43

16.

Erickson

Lind

E. A.

Johnson

B. C.

O’Barr

W. M.

(1978). Speech style and impression formation in a court setting: The effects of “powerful” and “powerless” speech. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14(3), 266–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(78)90015-X

17.

Fediuk

T. A.

Pace

K. M.

Botero

I. C.

(2011). Crisis response effectiveness: Methodological considerations for advancement in empirical investigation into response impact. In Coombs

W. T.

Holladay

S. J.

(Eds.), The handbook of crisis communication (pp. 221–242). John Wiley & Sons.

18.

Goffman

(1978). The presentation of self in everyday life. Harmondsworth.

19.

Hallgren

K. A.

(2012). Computing inter-rater reliability for observational data: An overview and tutorial. Tutorials in Quantitative Methods for Psychology, 8(1), 23–34. https://doi.org/10.20982/tqmp.08.1.p023

20.

Halliday

M. A. K.

(1994). An introduction to functional grammar. Edward Arnold.

21.

Hearit

K. M.

(2006). Crisis management by apology: Corporate response to allegations of wrongdoing. Routledge.

22.

Holdener

Kauffman

(2014). Getting out of the doghouse: The image repair strategies of Michael Vick. Public Relations Review, 40(1), 92–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2013.11.006

23.

Kiambi

D. M.

Shafer

(2016). Corporate crisis communication: Examining the interplay of reputation and crisis response strategies. Mass Communication and Society, 19(2), 127–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2015.1066013

24.

Koehn

Goranova

(2018). Do investors see value in ethically sound CEO apologies? Investigating stock market reaction to CEO apologies. Journal of Business Ethics, 152(2), 311–322. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3301-9

25.

Koesten

Rowland

R. C.

(2004). The rhetoric of atonement. Communication Studies, 55(1), 68–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970409388606

26.

Landis

J. R.

Koch

G. G.

(1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33(1), 159–174. https://doi.org/10.2307/2529310

27.

Lazare

(2005). On apology. Oxford University Press.

28.

Lewis

J. T.

Parra

G. R.

Cohen

(2015). Apologies in close relationships: A review of theory and research. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 7(1), 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12060

29.

Zhan

(2016). Effects of attributed responsibility and response strategies on organizational reputation: A meta-analysis of situational crisis communication theory research. Journal of Public Relations Research, 28(2), 102–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/1062726X.2016.1166367

30.

Martin

White

(2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.

31.

Nekmat

Gower

(2014). Status of image management research in public relations: A cross-disciplinary content analysis of studies published between 1991 and 2011. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 8(4), 276–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/1553118X.2014.907575

32.

Ngai

C. S. B.

Jin

(2016). The effectiveness of crisis communication strategies on Sina Weibo in relation to Chinese publics’ acceptance of these strategies. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 30(4), 451–494. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651916651907

33.

Ogiermann

(2009). On apologising in negative and positive politeness cultures. John Benjamins.

34.

Pace

K. M.

Fediuk

T. A.

Botero

I. C.

(2010). The acceptance of responsibility and expressions of regret in organizational apologies after a transgression. Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 15(4), 410–427. https://doi.org/10.1108/13563281011085510

35.

Rundquist

(2007). Apologies: form and function: I think it was your foot I was stepping on. In Hedberg

Zacharski

(Eds.), The grammar-pragmatics interface (pp. 293–312). John Benjamins.

36.

Shariati

Chamani

(2010). Apology strategies in Persian. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(6), 1689–1699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2009.10.007

37.

Ten Brinke

Adams

G. S

. (2015). Saving face? When emotion displays during public apologies mitigate damage to organizational performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 130, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2015.05.003

38.

Turk

J. V.

Jin

Stewart

Kim

Hipple

J. R.

(2012). Examining the interplay of an organization’s prior reputation, CEO’s visibility, and immediate response to a crisis. Public Relations Review, 38(4), 574–583. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2012.06.012

39.

Worthington

E. L.

(2006). Forgiveness and reconciliation: Theory and application. Routledge.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.26 MB