The effects of paracrisis origin and response strategy on audience’s perceived organisational reputation and behavioural intentions

Abstract

This project focuses on paracrisis management on Facebook. Recently, research has examined paracrisis response strategies to find adequate ways of handling these reputation threats. The objective of this study is to test different selected paracrisis response strategies and identify the most recommendable strategy. Four organisational response strategies were examined: reform, humour, refuse, and refute. Two within-subjects experiments were conducted. Using fictional paracrises of fictional international IT suppliers, differences and effects in respondents’ perceptions of organisational reputation and paracrisis behavioural intentions were analysed. This was investigated in quasi-experiments with self-imposed and external paracrisis origins. In both experiments the results show that a reform strategy is the most recommendable, and a humorous strategy is the least recommendable, for this paracrisis situation. This component of Public Relations can prevent potential real-world crises and protect organisations’ reputations. Paracrises are an increasing concern for organisations as social media provide a platform for critical user comments.