Emotional Crisis Communication: The Effects of CEO’s Expression of Guilt and Anger on Organizational Reputation

ABSTRACT Organizational crises are emotionally-charged occurrences for both organizations and their stakeholders. There has been a growing body of research on the effects of emotions on organizational outcomes such as reputation, forgiveness, and negative word-of-mouth. The current study seeks to contribute to this growing body of research in emotional crisis communication by investigating the role of discrete emotions in a crisis, and the effects of such emotions on organizational reputation. Additionally, the current study seeks to investigate whether the effect of emotional expression depends on the crisis response strategy adopted. A between-subjects three (communicated emotion; anger vs. guilt vs. no emotion) × two (response strategy: rebuilding vs. denial) experiment was designed with 922 participants. The findings show that, in the context of a severe crisis, rebuilding strategies result in a more positive organizational reputation than denial strategies and that guilt was superior to anger regardless of response type. The implications of the study on organizational reputation and crisis management are discussed.