Crisis occurs at the various levels such as person, organization, and nation. It is natural that crisis management is the core part for their survival in which a lot of researchers in psychology, sociology, marketing, public relations have being inter...
Crisis occurs at the various levels such as person, organization, and nation. It is natural that crisis management is the core part for their survival in which a lot of researchers in psychology, sociology, marketing, public relations have being interested. But the problem is that all the efforts have been fragmented as their own concerns and specialities. To synchronize their fragmented efforts, Coombs(2003) proposed ‘the Situational Crisis Communication Theory(SCCT)’which explained the relations between crisis situations and crisis response strategies. The purpose of this study is to contribute to theory-building of SCCT and making practical implications for the military.
This study has three research questions. <Research question 1> is related to categorize the various military crisis situations according to two dimensions of controllability and severity which attribute responsibility for certain crisis situations to the military organizations. Controllability refers to the degree of prediction and prevention by the military organizations. Severity refers to the degree of physical or reputational damage caused by crisis situations.
<RQ2> is to verify the research model based on the Coombs(2003)'s SCCT whose core concepts are controllability, severity, organization-public relationship, perceptions of crisis responsibility, and organizational reputation. Through the path analysis, this study figured out direct effects and indirect effects among the core concepts.
In the <RQ3>, Discriminating and explanatory power of the core concepts in the SCCT were tested through the discriminant analysis which made it possible to match between the military crisis situations and the selections of crisis response strategies.
The results are as follows. The military crisis situations are divided into four types, transgressional/accidental/doubtful/critical crisis types. In‘transgressional crisis type’, crisis situations has the high degree of controllability and severity. In‘accidental crisis type’, crisis situations has the high degree of controllability and the low degree of severity. In‘doubtful crisis type’, crisis situations has the high degree of severity and the low degree of controllability.
Secondly, all of the three hypothesis included in the <RQ2> were significant in the rest three crisis types except for the transgressional CT(crisis type). In the transgressional CT, only the controllability variable made effects on the variables of perceptions of crisis responsibility and organizational reputation. But the other crisis types, all of the independent variables(controllability, severity, relationship) significantly made direct and indirect effects on the perceptions of crisis responsibility and organizational reputation. This result means that the organizational reputation could be influenced negatively by related-publics' attributions which cause the crisis responsibility to the organizations as the results of judgement on the degree of controllability, severity, and relationship.
Therefore, the military organizations should focus on two practical implications to minimize the negative impacts on their own reputation. First, It's important to lessen the degree of perceptions of controllability and severity which related-publics could have. In addition, It's also important to stay close relationships with related-publics which makes it possible to increase the total positive impacts on their reputation as the forms of direct effects and indirect effects through perceptions of crisis responsibility.
Finally, the two dimensions of the military crisis types, controllability and severity were significant as the discriminating variables in this model. This means that the military organizations can make a selection of crisis response strategies responding to crisis situations according to the degree of two crisis dimensions. More specifically, It tends to select deal RS(response strategies) responding to transgressional CT. And deal RS or diminish RS responding to accidental CT, deal RS or denial RS responding to doubtful CT, diminish RS or deal RS responding to critical CT.
Therefore, the military organizations should consider two practical implications about‘crisis types and the selection of crisis response strategies’. First, the degree of controllability is the most important factor to make an effective selection of crisis response strategies to prevent the damage of the organizations' reputation. This means the more controllable crisis situations are, the more accommodative response strategies such as corrective option and full apology are needed. Also, the other factors such as severity, organization-public relationship should be selected according to the specifically related situations.