Lynette M McDonald - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Lynette M McDonald

CABI eBooks, Dec 15, 2006

9 For Better or Worse: Consumer Perceptions of Factors Impacting Company Crisis Outcome LYNETTE M... more 9 For Better or Worse: Consumer Perceptions of Factors Impacting Company Crisis Outcome LYNETTE M. MCDONALD, BEVERLEY SPARKS AND IAN ... Apart from anger and sympathy, the emotions that crises elicit in consumers has rarely been explored, although a study by ...

Public Relations Review, Sep 1, 2010

Despite the burgeoning number of studies examining stakeholder effects of crisis communication an... more Despite the burgeoning number of studies examining stakeholder effects of crisis communication and crisis causes, the varied categorizations used, together with inconsistent findings, has meant that knowledge gaps remain. Specifically, existing studies have not established whether a significant hierarchy of best communicated accounts exist that minimize crisis impact on stakeholder reactions. In addition, whether different crisis causes have different emotional, attitudinal and behavioral outcomes still requires examination. Further, crisis emotion research has been limited and has predominantly investigated anger and sympathy, indicating the need to explore a greater variety of crisis emotions. This investigation of the impact of a hierarchy of five crisis communication accounts and four crisis causes on multiple stakeholder reactions elicited several key findings. Although "confession" was the most preferred crisis account, "no comment" was almost as successful in mitigating negative reactions. Counterintuitively, confession reduced responsibility judgments. No comment was second to confession in mitigating negative, and promoting positive, reactions. Further, company control of a crisis was found to be the single most powerful predictor of stakeholder reactions. Involvement elicited multiple positive and negative crisis emotions, while different emotion categories elicited different behavioral intentions. Attitude to the company also impacted behavioral intentions. 2 Crises typically involve and affect multiple stakeholders. Consumers sometimes suffer injury or death, investors potentially experience financial losses, the public may be placed at risk, corporate managers lose employment (Siomkos, 1989), and employee jobs are threatened due to the potential for business collapse. Two known determinants of stakeholder crisis reactions are crisis communication and crisis cause or type. Experimental investigation of crisis communication is a rapidly growing research area (Coombs & Holladay, 2009), and includes accounts that can mitigate or aggravate stakeholder reactions. Accounts address responsibility acceptance for negative events (Weiner, 1995) such as a crisis. Although accounts are one of the few managerial tools available to public relations managers to mitigate negative outcomes during a crisis, little research has successfully investigated the effects of a hierarchy of different crisis accounts on stakeholder reactions. As responses become more accommodating to stakeholders they become more expensive (Stockmyer, 1996). The success of less accommodative accounts would provide practitioners with lower cost communication options.

idence that consumer emotions may run high as demonstrated nti-company web sites. Despite the neg... more idence that consumer emotions may run high as demonstrated nti-company web sites. Despite the negative implications for experience during a crisis, their duration and their behavioural his article reports preliminary findings of a focus group study paper reports on data emerging from focus group discussions ed around the three key themes of consumer attributions about otions and behaviours various crises evoked. The preliminary nd implications summarised.

Media reports on organizational crises provide evidence that consumer emotions may run high as de... more Media reports on organizational crises provide evidence that consumer emotions may run high as demonstrated by behaviours such as international boycotts and anti-company web sites. Despite the negative implications for companies, both the range of emotions consumers experience during a crisis, their duration and their behavioural implications appear not to have been examined. This article reports preliminary findings of a focus group study investigating consumer reactions to crises. This paper reports on data ...

Most public relations practitioners and scholars agree that public relations ’ functions include ... more Most public relations practitioners and scholars agree that public relations ’ functions include communication, stakeholder relationship management, reputation management, and strategic management. The purpose of this position paper is to continue the discussion on the current and future directions of the public relations discipline, which impacts both the practice and education of public relations. We start with a brief overview of the history of public relations and investigate the four functions of public relations (which have been suggested as paradigms) via an examination of seven studies on public relations practitioner roles in Europe,

A range of organisational crises are explored to discover how people react during a crisis and wh... more A range of organisational crises are explored to discover how people react during a crisis and why, with a view to planning strategic actions based on those reactions. We conclude that people react, not just according to how they feel but also, less obviously, that their behaviour can be predicted using a clear understanding of those feelings. This article narrows the field of feelings, or emotions, to six categories and provides a reliable spectrum along which these emotions operate. Using this spectrum we propose a taxonomy or ‘ready reckoner ’ of actions which individuals and organisations can take in response to these emotional reactions.i

reactions to company crisis communication and causes

Australian Journal of Psychology, 1999

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Advances in Consumer Research, 2012

ABSTRACT Crises negatively impact an organization’s financial stability, its relationship with it... more ABSTRACT Crises negatively impact an organization’s financial stability, its relationship with its publics, its image and reputation, as well as its ability to function, and to deliver its products and services (Jin and Cameron 2007). Between 2003 and 2006 almost half of U. S.-based multinationals were affected by major crises that caused catastrophic business impacts (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2006). In 2010, global insurance claims for man-made crises were $5 billion (Swiss Re 2010). Crises trigger emotions in impacted consumers. These emotions guide the interpretation of an unfolding crisis, shaping attitudes towards the organization (Jin, Pang, and Cameron 2007). Emotions influence stakeholders’ future organizational interactions, powerfully influencing post-crisis behavior (Coombs and Holladay 2005) such as product boycotts (Choi and Lin 2009). Yet crisis emotions’ influence on behavioral tendencies is little investigated (Coombs and Holladay 2005). A strong need exists to explore the variety of crisis-generated emotions (Choi and Lin 2009) to understand emotions and to develop effective crisis management strategies. The recently increasing momentum of crisis emotion research suggests the need for psychometrically-validated scales that reflect consumers’ experienced crisis emotions. However, no studies that reported significant effects for emotional response to organizational crises used scales that had been tested, not just for reliability and predictive validity, but for content validity, unidimensionality, and convergent and discriminant validity as specified by Churchill (1979), Gerbing and Anderson (1988), and Hair et al. (2009). Measures should incorporate the diversity of most frequently experienced emotions in a particular context, and use readily understood words (Richins 1997), ideally using laypersons’ own emotion lexicon (Carpenter and Halberstadt 1996). Across three studies we develop an instrument to measure crisis emotions as a tool for managers and scholars to identify consumers’ crisis emotional responses and intensity, predict behavioral outcomes, guide crisis communication strategies, and indicate degree of crisis management success.

Advances in Consumer Research, 1998

Being able to predict consumers' reactions to mishaps would greatly benefit crisis management... more Being able to predict consumers' reactions to mishaps would greatly benefit crisis management. The limited research available in this area generally uses either attribution theory or the theory of reasoned action. In this paper we critically analyze the appropriateness of these two theoretical frameworks for research in this area. We conclude that generalization of these theories to the context of consumer response to organizational mishaps (for which neither was intended), yields an unsatisfactory description of the processes involved. In view of these criticisms, we incorporate aspects of both theories within an affective events theory framework to develop an integrated model aimed at the organizational mishap context.

Understanding spontaneous volunteers Spontaneous volunteers who converge on disaster areas play a... more Understanding spontaneous volunteers Spontaneous volunteers who converge on disaster areas play a critical response role, often being first on the scene and typically trusted by victims (Fulmer, Portelli, Foltin, Zimmerman, Chachkes, and Goldfrank, 2007). The term 'spontaneous volunteers' refers to individuals who provide assistance immediately following a disaster (Lowe and Forthergill, 2003). The sometimes overwhelming number of spontaneous volunteers, from both within and outside the disaster-affected community, poses significant challenges for disaster relief and recovery services (Barraket, Keast, Newton, Walters, and James, 2013). Characteristically, as spontaneous volunteers are seen to hinder relief efforts, government and emergency management agencies resist harnessing this workforce (Drabek and McEntire, 2003). Yet these untrained volunteers are integral to accomplishing many disaster recovery tasks (Barsky, Trainor, Torres, and Aguirre, 2007). Indeed, most respons...

Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal, 2006

In 2001, the now defunct airline, Ansett, was enmeshed in a major safety crisis when its fleet of... more In 2001, the now defunct airline, Ansett, was enmeshed in a major safety crisis when its fleet of 10 Boeing 767s was grounded by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) after safety checks revealed engine pylon cracks. The grounding caused flight cancellations, mass disruptions of passengers, reputation damage and multi-millions of dollars in lost market share for Ansett. A series of focus groups held soon after the groundings revealed three sets of consumer perceptions about the crisis cause: that Ansett was at fault for the safety crisis due to poor maintenance; that the government agency, CASA and, in part, the media, were to blame for scapegoating Ansett and blowing the crisis out of proportion; and that maintenance problems were endemic to the Australian airline industry due to cost-cutting following deregulation, with the Federal government also held to blame for the situation. Using Weiner’s (1986, 1995) attribution theory, this paper describes how participants’ three diff...

The nature of organizational crises, coupled with the seriousness of their impact and the likelih... more The nature of organizational crises, coupled with the seriousness of their impact and the likelihood that they will receive high levels of media attention, suggests the need for crisis scenario planners to accurately predict how consumers will respond to companies in crisis. Crises trigger emotions in impacted consumers which facilitate or hinder the effectiveness of crisis response strategies (Coombs and Holladay, 2005) and determine crisis behaviour, such as negative purchase and investment intent (Jorgensen, 1996) and negative word-of-mouth behaviour (McDonald, Sparks, and Glendon, 2010). Emotions and behaviours are normally considered as input variables rather than outputs in scenario planning (Van Notten, Rotmans, Van Asselt, and Rothman 2003:431-432), but justification for examining expected emotional outputs in scenario planning is generally available in literature on multi-criteria decision analysis (Wenstop, 2005), emotional intelligence (Callahan, 2008), and visionary mana...

PRism, 2011

Most public relations practitioners and scholars agree that public relations’ functions include c... more Most public relations practitioners and scholars agree that public relations’ functions include communication, stakeholder relationship management, reputation management, and strategic management. The purpose of this position paper is to continue the discussion on the current and future directions of the public relations discipline, which impacts both the practice and education of public relations. We start with a brief overview of the history of public relations and investigate the four functions of public relations (which have been suggested as paradigms) via an examination of seven studies on public relations practitioner roles in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. After examining these studies, we suggest that there seems to be an increasing practitioner focus in Europe and Australia on public relations’ strategic management function, which marks a return to public relations’ earlier, more solid foundations. We contend that the professionalisation of the public relation...

Mcdonald, L. and Hartel, CE (1999). Use of affective events theory to explain the impact of compa... more Mcdonald, L. and Hartel, CE (1999). Use of affective events theory to explain the impact of company mishaps on consumer anger and purchase intentions. In: PJ Dowling, J. Garnham, D. Hanson and K. Lehman, ANZAM&#x27;99 Conference Proceedings. ANZAM&#x27;99 From the edge: Management beyond, Wrest Point Casino, Hobart, Tas., (CD Rom). December 1-4, 1999.