70 Understanding Rational Decision Making
How the audience perceives an organization’s response to a crisis is critical to retaining organiza-tional legitimacy and to maintaining employee morale.^52 Nondefensive crisis responses, as opposed
to defensive ones, give audience members signifi cantly better impressions of the organization and
lead to greater levels of trust.^53 When individuals or organizations face a crisis for which they truly
are to blame, accepting responsibility and expressing regret affects audience perceptions of them
positively and decreases the anger audience members feel.^54
Ironically, the more a business attempts to deny responsibility for a crisis, the more the audi-ence will judge it to be responsible.^55 Audience members are also more likely to assign blame
when they can identify a particular person (for instance, a fi rm’s CEO) as being responsible,
when they believe the person should have foreseen and prevented the event, when they believe
the person’s actions were not justifi ed by the situation, and when they believe the person was
free to choose another course of action.^56
Audiences are more likely to exonerate the responsible party from blame if the responsibleparty offers an explanation for the incident and offers help or compensation to the victims.^57
The victims themselves generally have more favorable impressions of the responsible party,
experience more positive affect, and are more likely to refrain from seeking revenge when the
responsible party apologizes to them for the wrongdoing.^58 From the audience’s perspective, an
effective apology includes expressions of remorse, acknowledgements of responsibility, promises
of forbearance, and offers of reparation. However, audiences do not require all four components
to be present for the apology to be effective, nor do they limit apology components to these
four.^59
The following list of questions subsumes many of the criteria identifi ed previously and providesa starting point for predicting a principal’s decision criteria for any particular exonerative decision.
The list can also serve as an outline for documents and presentations agents produce in order to
elicit exonerative decisions from principals.
- Who is responsible for the incident?
- What is the reason for the incident?
- Could it have been prevented?
- What has been done to relieve the victims?
- How much compensation is the responsible party prepared to offer?
- What guarantee is there that the incident will not be repeated?
In addition to agents’ answers to the previous questions, principals may also require benchmark
information about the individual’s or the organization’s prior responses to similar situations,
others’ responses, possible alternative responses, as well as industry best practices in similar
situations.
Occasionally principals seek, or should seek, what amounts to an exonerative decision fromtheir agents. On the following page is a notice of organizational downsizing from a manager in
a health care network as well as think-aloud comments made by one of the employees, or agents,
who actually received the notice (note: the dates, names of the fi rms, and names of the employees
have been changed). The employee’s comments are numbered and inserted into the notice in bold
and brackets. The comments about the notice are quite negative, even hostile. What is missing
from the notice are clear-cut answers to the employee’s decision criteria. The employee needed
answers to questions such as “Who is responsible for the decision to downsize?” (see comment 5),
“What was the reason?” (see comments 5 and 7), “Could the downsizing have been prevented?”