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Research practice seminar final paper
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Written Assignment：The effect of communication content and channel on the
reputation of an organization
, Introduction
Crisis communication plays an important role in rebuilding organizations’
reputations after a crisis. Choosing crisis response strategies and response channels
can affect the effect of crisis communication to a large extent. Crisis response
strategies refer to management’s reaction that aims at repairing the reputation after a
crisis (Coombs, 2007). Previous studies have shown that there are three primary crisis
response strategies based on Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT):
denial strategy, diminish strategy and rebuild strategy (Coombs, 2006). Besides, with
the development of new media and informational technology, the use of social media
has become an important part of the communication field. It reminds a question that
how the response channel and response strategies will affect the result of crisis
communication.
One of the important indicators to measure the result of crisis communication is
people’s perceived reputation of an organization after the crisis. Based on Coombs’
(2007) Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), previous studies have
shown that the rebuild strategy has a more positive effect on an organization’s
reputation, compared with denial strategy and diminish strategy (Claeys et al., 2010).
Thus, hypothesis 1 is that: the rebuild strategy has a stronger positive effect on
people’s perceived reputation of an organization than the denial strategy.
Except for the communication strategy, the choice of communication channel
also plays a role in crisis communication. Multiple researches have studied the effect
of communication channel on the result of crisis communication (Schultz et al., 2011;
Liu et al., 2016). For instance, the experiment in 2011 with 1677 participants has
shown that the medium is more important than the message, and as the
communication channel, Twitter leads to fewer negative reactions than newspaper
articles and blogs (Schultz et al., 2011). Here, the hypothesis 2 is: using twitter as a
communication channel has a stronger positive effect on people’s perceived
reputation of an organization than using press release as a communication channel.
1
, Crisis involvement also plays a role in crisis communication. Evidence has
shown that people with a higher level of crisis involvement tend to inspect the crisis
information in a deeper way, compared with people with a low level of crisis
involvement (Choi & Lin, 2009). Choi and Lin (2009) found that people with
different level of involvement held different attitudes towards the crisis, which may
because people with a high level of involvement turn to care more about the crisis.
Here, the third hypothesis is: the negative effect of denial strategy on people’s
perceived reputation of an organization is stronger for people with a high level of
crisis involvement than for people with a relatively low level of crisis involvement.
This study will take communication strategies and communication channels as
the independent variables, people’s perceived reputation of an organization as the
dependent variable, and use the crisis involvement as the moderator to exam the
research question that: do the communication channel and content of crisis
information about a crisis influence people’s perceived reputation of an organization?
As previously stated, communication strategies and communication channels both
have an effect on crisis communication results. However, it remains a question that
whether the matching of different communication strategies and communication
channels will lead to the same result. Therefore, hypothesis 4 is that: using Twitter as
a communication channel has an even stronger positive effect on people’s perceived
reputation of an organization for rebuilding communication strategies than for
denying communication strategies.
Method Section
Design. This study conducts a survey-embedded online experiment, which is a
cross-sectional research design. To examine the relationship between independent
variables communication strategies and communication channels, dependent variable
people’s perceived reputation, and moderator crisis involvement, this study employs a
2 (crisis response strategy: denial vs rebuild strategy) x 2 (communication channel:
Twitter vs press release) between subject’s factorial design and 3 moderators
2
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