Situational Crisis Communication Theory

Literature Review

Crisis management Crisis management is critical and crucial function of an organization. The failure in crisis management may results in harms to the stakeholders, damage of the reputation, and loses the organization in the end (Commbs, 2007). Crisis can be defined as a threaten to the organization and it will have a negative effect or negative consequences if the organization cannot handle the crisis properly. Dilenschneider (2000) address in The Corporate Communications Bible, all crises are threats of the organization's reputation. According to Commbs (2007), all crises create three threats: 1, public safety, 2, financial loss, and 3, reputation loss. Crisis management is a carefully designed process to prevent, prepare and minimize the damage a crisis can do to an organization and its stakeholders. Thus, crisis management can be divided into three phases: pre-crisis, crisis response and post-crisis (Coombs, 2014 pp.26-30). All three phases are important in crisis management, however, as for this study, the focusing point is crisis response stage.

Situational Crisis Communication Theory

Benson (1988) identified several crisis types and response strategies to correlate to the particular type of crisis. The reputations are threatened during crisis, researches begun to explore how crisis response

According to the perceptions of accepting responsibility for a crisis, Coombs divided the response strategies into primary and secondary strategies (Coombs, 2006). The response strategies of SCCT are developed from Benoit (1997) image restoration strategies with the purpose of strategically shape the public reputation of an organization. The primary response strategies are: 1, denial, 2, diminishment, and 3, rebuild. The secondary response strategy is 4,