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What Joseph Schooling did right ….
At its essence, reputation management is about helping stakeholders attribute blame and deal with their anger. Depending on the extent to which the organization (or individual) is responsible/ culpable, there are conceptually four response strategies.
However, before we talk strategy, we need to first understand the psychology of how stakeholders attribute blame. According to Bernard Weiner, stakeholders use three factors when attributing blame — locus of control (refers to the perception of whether the crisis was caused by the organization or the situation); stability (whether the factors contributing to the crisis were predictable); and controllability (whether the organization could have acted to prevent it). Thus, if the crisis was caused by the organization, was something that the organization could reasonably have predicted to occur, and it was within the ability of the organization to prevent, then the attribution of responsibility would be high.
Crisis Response Strategies
With attribution theory as the basis, the following are the four strategies organization can adopt depending on the attribution of blame:
Deny. In this strategy, the organization is not responsible for the crisis and the cause is unknown. The…
