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made by other sources. With the time passes by, organization will confront stronger pressure from public and media.
Another keyword organization should keep in mind when facing a crisis situation is to be
“consistent.” Public relations practitioners suggest that organization should centralize
communication. For instance, assign a high-level executive as spokesperson, and this authorized spokesperson should receive professional training in how to speak to the media. Organization should also discuss about the key messages, and keep all the employees informed of the crisis event and the key message points.
For the post-crisis communication, organization should continuously monitor, analyze, and evaluate the efforts. More importantly, organizations should seek to improve the crisis management process, and to document the lessons learned in order to create better crisis plans in case of similar crisis in the future.
2.3 Major Crisis Communication Theories
Pressure and damage increase with time when a crisis breaks out. Crisis communication remains a popular topic in both academia and industry for decades. Scholars have noticed how an
organization communicate with the public in a crisis situation is critical, because it will influence whether the result of crisis management is successful or not. Many scholars like Coombs, Benoit, Lerbinger and Taylor have been dedicated to crisis management and crisis communication studies for several years.
In terms of theories used, the most frequently cited or mentioned was Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). Coombs began the development of SCCT in 1995, and has been
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continuously verifying and revising this theory as of 2015. SCCT translated Attribution Theory (AT) into the language of crisis communication as a base for the theory. It is logical to extend AT to crisis communication. When a crisis happens, stakeholders will make judgement on the situation, and make attributions of crisis responsibility on organization or environmental factors. The need to understand the factors that shape people’s attributions and reactions to crises is what makes AT approaches audience-oriented (Weiner, 1986).
Extended from AT, SCCT provides guidelines for crisis managers to select appropriate response strategies that fit best with particular crisis situation (Coombs, 2012). The body of SCCT is crisis responsibility. Attributions of crisis responsibility are crucial factors which influence how
stakeholders perceive the reputation of an organization in crisis, and have significant effect on their affective and behavioral responses to the organization. Therefore, SCCT suggests that how
stakeholders perceive the crisis should be the most important index when making crisis response strategies. In other words, SCCT is also audience-centered. Organizations must put people as first priority when a crisis breaks out, since how stakeholders make attributions about the crisis
responsibility will affect the relationship between organization and public. Because every crisis is different depending on the context, there is no fixed rule to follow in the crisis management process.
SCCT offers adaptive approaches for crisis managers depend on stakeholders’ reactions toward the crisis and crisis response strategies.
As mentioned, crisis responsibility is a major factor in determining the threat caused by a crisis for an organization. SCCT proposes a two-step process for figuring out the level of crisis threat. The first step is to determine the frame stakeholders are using to categorize the crisis event. SCCT categorized crisis into three types: (1) victim (low crisis responsibility/threat), (2) accident (minimal
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crisis responsibility/threat), and (3) intentional (strong crisis responsibility/threat). The three categories represent increasing levels of attributions of crisis responsibility and threat caused by a crisis (Coombs, 2012).
When talking about crisis responsibility, there are intensifying factors that could alter attributions of crisis responsibility and intensify the threat from the crisis. The second step of examine the level of crisis threat is to determine if any intensifying factors exist. There are two intensifying factors: (1) crisis history and (2) prior reputation of the organization. Crisis history is to check if the organization has had similar crises in the past. Past crises might lead to an impression of
“bad behavior” by an organization. Stakeholders might attribute greater crisis responsibility when the organization has a record of past crisis (Coombs, 2004b). The other intensifying factor is
organization’s prior reputation, which tells how well or poorly the organization has treated its stakeholders in the past. In other words, prior reputation indicates an organization’s relationship with stakeholders. A negative prior reputation will attribute greater crisis responsibility for the same crisis than an organization that has a positive prior reputation, or even an unknown organization (Coombs
& Holladay, 2002 & 2007). If an organization meets one of the intensifying factors, it will increase attributions of crisis responsibility, and further raise the level of threat from a crisis. SCCT helps crisis managers determine the appropriate crisis response base on the threat level.
SCCT includes three core elements: the crisis situation, crisis response strategies, and a system for matching the crisis situation and crisis response strategies (Coombs, 2006). Figure 1 provides crisis response approaches depend on stakeholders’ perception of organization’s crisis responsibility (Coombs, 1999; Wu, 2000). Table 2 offers SCCT recommendations base on the matching of crisis situation and crisis response strategies.
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Table 2 Theoretical Proposition of SCCT (Coombs, 1999)
Defensive
Attack the Accuser
Denial Excuse Justification Ingratiation
Corrective
Rumor Natural Disaster Malevolence Accident Misdeed
Strong crisis responsibility/
threat
The eight crisis response strategies can be ordered along a continuum ranging from defensive, putting organizational interests first, to accommodative, putting victim concerns first (Coombs &
Holladay, 2002). Following are the detailed explanation of each strategy:
1. An attack on the accuser: To confront the group or person that claims a crisis exists.
2. Denial: Claiming that there is no crisis.
3. Excuse: In an attempt to minimize organizational responsibility for the crisis.
4. Justification: In an attempt to minimize the perceived damage inflicted by the crisis.
5. Ingratiation: To praise stakeholders and reminds them of the past good works done by the organization.
6. Corrective action: Try to prevent a repeat of the crisis and/or repair the damage done by the crisis.
7. Full apology, the organization publicly accepts responsibility for the crisis and requests forgiveness from the stakeholders.
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Table 3 SCCT Recommendations (Coombs, 2012)
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1. All victims or potential victims should receive instructing information, including recall information. This is one-half of the base response to a crisis.
2. All victims should be provided an expression of sympathy, any information about corrective actions, and trauma counseling when needed. This can be called the “care response.” This is the second-half of the base response to a crisis.
3. For crises with minimal attributions of crisis responsibility and no intensifying factors, instructing information and care response is sufficient.
4. For crises with minimal attributions of crisis responsibility and an intensifying factor, add excuse and/or justification strategies to the instructing information and care response.
5. For crises with low attributions of crisis responsibility, and no intensifying factors, add excuse and/or justification strategies to the instructing information and care response.
6. For crises with low attributions of crisis responsibility and an intensifying factor, add
compensation and/or apology strategies to the instructing information and care response.
7. For crises with strong attributions of crisis responsibility, add compensation and/or apology strategies to the instructing information and care response.
8. The compensation strategy is used anytime victims suffer serious harm.
9. The reminder and ingratiation strategies can be used to supplement any response.
10. Denial and attack the accuser strategies are best used only for combating rumors and/or challenges to the morality of an organization’s behaviors.
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To fully understand the development of Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory, it is important to understand the theoretical perspectives of Benoit’s Image Restoration Theory, which has informed the growth of the SCCT. In addition to the SCCT, Benoit’s Image Restoration Theory (1997) is also widely used in public relations and crisis communication research.
To completely understand the Image Restoration Theory, it is important to define image. A corporation’s image is a subjective impression of that business held by other people. When an
organization’s image is prone to being damaged, it is critical for that organization to take the necessary precautions to prevent a potential image distortion or take immediate action in repairing image (Wright, 2009). According to Benoit's Image Restoration Theory, there are fourteen strategies which offer organizations different kinds of message options in a crisis situation. The theory has five main
categories of image repair actions which suggest the organizations what to do when facing a situation.
Image Restoration Theory proposed by Benoit (1997) is as follows:
1. Denial
i. Simple Denial: Reject fault, or act did not occur, or act is not harmful.
ii. Shift the Blame: Act performed by another.
2. Evasion of Responsibility
i. Provocation: Act occurred as a result of responding to the offense of another.
ii. Defeasibility: Act was due to lack of information or ability.
iii. Accident: Act was a mishap.
iv. Good Intentions: Act was meant well.
3. Reducing Offensiveness of Event
i. Bolstering: Stress organization's good traits.
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ii. Minimization: Act was not serious.
iii. Differentiation: Act was less serious or offensive than similar ones.
iv. Transcendence: More important considerations so that the act was forgivable.
v. Attack Accuser: Reduce credibility of the attackers.
vi. Compensation: Reimburse victims to reduce negative impression on the organization.
4. Corrective Action: Plan to solve or prevent problem 5. Mortification: Apologize for act
A major drawback of this model is that it does not offer insight on when and how to use these strategies. It does not provide clear direction for public relations practitioners on how to choose correctly a strategy in a certain crisis. Therefore, this study both applied Coombs’ SCCT and Benoit’s Image Restoration Theory to examine Taipei Lee-Chi’s crisis situation and its crisis communication strategies.