Within- and between-person(s) emotional reactions toward crisis communication

Abstract

Purpose

The study sought to explore how people's negative emotions change in a crisis situation when they get to know about the crisis and the corporate's socially responsible activities after crisis.

Design/methodology/approach

A 2 (crisis type: human error vs organization misdeed) × 2 (CSR fit: low vs high) × 3 (motive disclosure: no disclosure vs company-oriented disclosure vs society-oriented disclosure) between-subjects experiment was conducted online.

Findings

More anger was elicited toward organizational misdeed than human error from both within-person and between-persons perspectives. When using CSR as postcrisis strategy, within-person analyses revealed that high CSR fit in message helped to attenuate sadness (and potentially anger) to a greater extent than low CSR fit, whereas between-persons analyses did not find significant effects of either CSR fit or motive disclosure.

Originality/value

Our findings demonstrate that situational dynamics in crisis situation constantly influence people's emotional states, suggesting a vertical investigation (e.g. within-individual analysis) of emotions may help both scholars and practitioners better understand the nature of crisis emotions and provide fresh insights on how to cope with them.

Citation

Wei, L. and Kim, N. (2021), "Within- and between-person(s) emotional reactions toward crisis communication", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 26 No. 2, pp. 420-437. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-06-2020-0096