Week 3 Assignment - Operationalization and Variables

Assignment (Week 3)- Operationalization and Variables

Journal Article- (Points – 50)

Please read the attached journal article titled- ‘Restoring reputations in times of crisis: An experimental study of the Situational Crisis Communication Theory and the moderating effects of locus of control’.

Hint: Week 1 folder provides you tips on ‘how to find and read research articles’. Use those tips to skim through the article. I have also highlighted few sections (in yellow) that are important from this assignment perspective.

Pay attention to the theory and measures section of the paper to answer the following questions:

Abstract: This study attempts to provide empirical evidence for Coombs’ (2007) Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), which provides guidelines for matching crisis response strategies to crisis types to best restore organizational reputations in times of crisis. The impact of crisis type and crisis response strategies on perceptions of corporate reputation is measured for 316 consumers participating in a 3 (crisis type: victim crisis, accidental crisis, preventable crisis) × 3 (crisis response: deny strategy, diminish strategy, rebuild strategy) between-subjects experimental design. The results show that preventable crises have the most negative effects on organizational reputation and that the rebuild strategy leads to the most positive reputational restoration. Moreover, the more severe people judge a crisis to be, the more negative are their perceptions of the organization’s reputation. The interaction effect between crisis type and crisis response strategies on corporate reputation is not significant. However, a person’s locus of control has a moderating impact on the relationship between crisis response strategy and organizational reputation. Specifically, the results show that people with an external locus of control prefer the use of deny strategies more than people with an internal locus of control 

1. Identify the theory used in the article (5 points)

2. Describe the theory briefly (10 points)

3. Describe their Hypothesis 1 (H1) (5 points)

4. Do you think the authors did a good job in how they developed their hypothesis? (5 points)

5. Identify all variables in the study (5 points).

6. How was each variable operationally defined? (5 points)

7. How was each variable measured (i.e what scales were used)? (5 points)

8. What was the scale of measurement for each variable? (5 points)

9. Provide the APA citation of the article (5 points) (Hint: Week 1 folder has a separate powerpoint that talks about how to cite in APA style)

 

Public Relations Review

Restoring reputations in times of crisis: An experimental study of the Situational Crisis Communication Theory and the moderating effects of locus of control

A.-S. Claeys et al. / Public Relations Review 36 (2010) 256–262 257

Table 1 Match between crisis types and crisis response strategies.

Crisis types Crisis response strategies

Victim cluster Deny strategies Natural disaster Attack the accuser Rumor Denial Workplace violence Scapegoat Product tampering/Malevolence

Accidental cluster Diminish strategies Challenges Excuse Technical-error accidents Justification Technical-error product harm

Preventable cluster Rebuild strategies Human-error accidents Compensation Human-error product harm Apology Organizational misdeed with no injuries Organizational misdeed management misconduct Organizational misdeed with injuries

Source: adapted from: Coombs (2007), p. 168 and 170.

to the attributions that people make for behavioural consequences and reinforcements (Duffy, Downey, & Shiflett, 1977). A person’s locus of control may influence the value he or she places on either internal or external control in organizational crisis responses (Rotter, 1966). Because crisis response strategies differ in the way they attempt to convince an audience that a crisis is attributed to either internal or external factors, it stands to reason that people with an internal locus of control prefer the use of different crisis response strategies than people with an external locus of control.

In what follows, we present a theoretical overview and develop the hypotheses. Then, we discuss the method of the experiment and the results.

2. The SCCT

The SCCT divides crisis types into three crisis clusters (Coombs, 2007; Coombs & Holladay, 2002). The victim cluster is defined as crises with weak attributions of organizational responsibility. The accidental cluster involves crises in which a certain, but low, level of responsibility are attributed to the organization. The preventable cluster includes crises for which the organization is perceived as being responsible (see Table 1).

The more responsibility that is attributed to the organization with respect to the crisis, the more negative is the impact on the organizational reputation (Coombs, 1998). Therefore, different types of crisis inflict different amounts of reputational damage. This leads to the following hypothesis:

H1. The victim crisis leads to a less negative effect on organizational reputation than the accidental or preventable crisis. The accidental crisis leads to a moderately negative effect on organizational reputation compared with the victim or preventable crisis. The preventable crisis leads to the most negative impact on organizational reputation compared with the victim or accidental crisis.

Within the range of response strategies, several clusters have also been detected (Coombs, 2004, 2007; Huang, Lin, & Su, 2005) (see Table 1). Deny strategies claim that no crisis exists (denial) or declare that the organization has no responsibility for it (scapegoat) (Coombs, 2007). Diminish strategies argue that a crisis is not as serious as people think (justification) or minimize organizational responsibility (excuse). Rebuild crisis strategies offer compensation for the crisis or apologize. Research has shown that offering an apology—a rebuild crisis response strategy—leads to more effective reputation restoration than the more defensive deny or diminish response strategies (Coombs & Holladay, 2008).