The buffering effect of industry-wide crisis history during crisis

Two questions guide this study: “Do two crisis history types (i.e. organization-specific vs industry-wide) have the same effect on publics’ perception of the organization in a crisis?” And “Is there any significant difference in public responses between the high and low levels of issue involvement?” The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A two organization-specific crisis history (frequent vs infrequent) × two industry-wide crisis history (frequent vs infrequent) × two consumer issue involvement (high vs low) between-subjects experimental design was employed.

This experiment suggests that an industry-wide crisis history can mitigate negative damages of a crisis, while an organization-specific crisis history intensifies the damages. This indicates that crisis history types should be considered as an important factor when diagnosing appropriate crisis response strategies during crisis. This study also identifies a stronger negative impact of an organization-specific crisis history among highly issue-involved publics than less involved publics.

This study extends situational crisis communication theory by identifying the buffering impact of an industry-wide crisis history and adding crisis history type as an influencer in the process of the publics’ crisis responsibility attributions.