The moderating effect of response and sources on the relationship between sadness and reputation

This paper attempts to understand crisis communication as an information process from a social psychology perspective, specifically, the elaboration likelihood model and affect priming theory. The effectiveness of response strategies on social media will be explored through the impact of how the audiences process the information with a perception toward organizational reputation as well as attention to how emotions relate to this process. The effect priming theory illustrated the relationship between emotion and judgment, while based on the elaborate likelihood model, the assumption lies on multiple sources with multiple arguments, the same as personal relevance that will exert different impacts on the degree of elaboration thereby forming different perceptions toward reputation.

By employing a real case in Mainland China, happened on April 2016, as a sample case to test the elaboration likelihood model – young lady attacked in HEYI hotel, this paper intends to detect the relationship between stakeholders’ sadness and their perception of reputation or organization and to explore the moderation effect of single/multiple sources and emotional/non-emotional response on the relationship between sadness and reputation.

An experiment was employed of 140 undergraduate students from Mainland China and Hong Kong, for understanding how the response strategy and multiple sources influence public perception of organizational reputation. This experiment followed a 2 (response strategy) X 2 (multiple sources) design; all participants were randomly assigned to four conditions (three experimental groups and one control group). PROCESS was adopted in data analysis of this research.

We find that there is no direct relationship between sadness and perceived reputation (β=-.10, t= 1.1, p=. 29). But most importantly, after interacting with the emotional/non-emotional response and single/multiple resources, stakeholders’ sadness turns to be negatively related to the perception of organization’s reputation. In other words, there is a three-ways interaction effect, which is interacted by sadness, response strategy and multiple sources on predicting people’s perceptions on corporate reputation (F (1,131) =4.00, p=. 048, R²=. 01). Under the condition of a single source and unemotional response from the company, the higher level of sadness respondents report, the lower level of perception of reputation toward the company they evaluate (B=-.18, SE=. 09, t (131)=-2.06, p=. 045).

This finding has theoretical as well as practical implications. A theoretical implication is that future researchers should consider the affective and cognitive perspectives of reputation. Also this is a supplement on crisis communication since understanding crisis communication from the relationship between stakeholders’ negative emotions and their perception toward company’s reputation and moderation effect based on the elaboration likelihood model are not often seen on this field. A practical application is that the awareness of stakeholders’ negative emotion and exploring specific strategies to relieve this negative emotion are essential regarding rebuilding company’s reputation. Not only emotional/non-emotional response strategy and single/multiple resources exert moderation effect on the relationship between stakeholders’ sadness and their perception of company’s reputation, but also, these three factors have an impact on reputation respectively. However, the effective and moderate strategies of editing and delivering emotional messages should be identified according to different negative emotions: sadness, fright, anger, and anxiety. A future study could distinguish message strategies/persuasion techniques specifically by different negative emotions.