The Impact Of Corporate Apology On Attribution Of Responsibility And Public Anger

As economic rapidly developing and informationization tide voluming, moreand more enterprise face the survival environment with a lot of uncertainty. Frequentbusiness crisis leads many companies saddled with heavy crisis history. Based on theliterature review of product crisis,corporate apology, public anger, attribution ofresponsibility, carding the relationship of product crisis and enterprise apology withattribution of responsibility and public anger, and combining with the present fact ofthe frequent enterprise crisis, we put forward hypothesis and research questions in thispaper.In this paper,a total of five assumptions and a research question are proposed,all built around a research topic-Under the background of crisis history, the influenceof different elements combination of corporate apology on attribution of responsibilityand the public anger. This reseach adopt situational experiment method and comparebetween groups.There are two experiments, the experimental1has six subjectsgroups, and the experiment2has three subjects group. A total of444people took partin the experiment, finally get311valid data. Through the data analysis of covariance,correlation analysis and so on, the hypothesis can be tested, and research questionswill be discussed. The valuable results we got are as followed:(1)Under the impact of the crisis history, the apology which contains fourelements-acknowledge of mistake, sympathy/remorse, compensation, andcorporate commitment can greater ease public anger than any of the three elements ofthe corporate apology.(2)Under the impact of the crisis history, the impacts of different elementscomposition elements of apology on responsibility attribution are not same. In the fullapology scenario, the scores of three elements of responsibility attribution weresignificantly declined relative to other apology scenario which lack one of the fourelements.(3)Under the impact of the crisis history,the three factors of responsibilityattribution and public anger are positively correlated.When the factors ofresponsibility attribution change, public anger also change in the same direction, dueto the positive correlation between responsibility attribution and the public anger.(4)Under the impact of the crisis history, the influence of different elementsof corporate apology to the effect of apology are different, some elements are moreinfluential. (5)Under the impact of the crisis history,with a full apology, the impact ofbearing active aknowledgement of mistake and responsibility contrast to bearingpassive aknowledgement of mistake and responsibility on the attribution process andpublic anger has significant differences. In the scenario of active and full apology,attribution of responsibility and public anger have greater magnitude of change.