مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله تحقیقات بازاریابی – Journal of Business Research

۱٫۱٫ Self-disclosure Self-disclosing incriminating information can minimize that information’s value. Research in the context of social psychology, for instance, illustrates that people who are responsible for a negative event in their lives should self-disclose this information when they meet someone new (Archer & Burleson, 1980; Jones & Gordon, 1972). If not, a potential partner will consider them less attractive. Trial studies further indicate the potential positive impact of self-disclosing incriminating information. Indeed, when a defendant in trial attempts to hold back incriminating information, jury members may be more interested in this information and consider that information more severe when they find out (Dolnik, Case, & Williams, 2003; Williams, Bourgeois, & Croyle, 1993).

The importance of self-disclosure of detrimental information is, however, especially apparent for organizations in crisis. When organizations fear negative publicity, they have two options (Easley, Bearden, & Teel, 1995; Wigley, 2011): self-disclose a crisis or wait until crisis information is dispersed by a third party. The former crisis timing strategy is commonly referred to as stealing thunder and implies that an organization “breaks the news about its own crisis before the crisis is discovered by the media or other interested parties” (Arpan & Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2005, p. 425). In this case the organization self-discloses a crisis before external parties communicate about the events (Dolnik et al., 2003; Williams et al., 1993). The latter crisis timing strategy is often called thunder, in which case the crisis is announced by an external party. The general advise for organizations is to self-disclose crises whenever they can, since this reduces the negative impact of crisis information on stakeholders (Claeys & Cauberghe, 2012; Dolnik et al., 2003; Mauet, 2007). Selfdisclosure is especially feasible when the spread of incriminating information is unavoidable (Easley et al., 1995). Research in social psychology additionally suggests that self-disclosing negative events is most crucial whenever one is highly responsible for them (Archer & Burleson, 1980; Jones & Gordon, 1972). Because in today’s corporate world secrets are likely to surface eventually, and revelations of such secrets can trigger new reputational crises (Coombs & Holladay, 2002), the self-disclosure of crises is indeed a reasonable option.

A number of theoretical frameworks has been offered to explain the effectiveness of an organizational self-disclosure in minimizing reputational damage. According to the disconfirmation of expectations theory (Arpan & Pompper, 2003), for instance, withholding information about a crisis confirms the biases that stakeholders have of organizational communication. Stakeholders expect organizations to only communicate what is in their own best interest. An organization that steals thunder, however, disconfirms stakeholders’ negative expectancies, which results in greater credibility of the organization (Arpan & Pompper, 2003; Williams et al., 1993). Similarly, the change of meaning hypothesis suggests an organizational self-disclosure results in an inconsistency in the eyes of stakeholders, who will attempt to resolve that inconsistency by changing the meaning of the disclosure in order to make the revelation more consistent to their expectations of the organization (Arpan & Pompper, 2003; Williams et al., 1993). As such, they may consider self-disclosed information less severe, which is consistent to their expectation that organizations would not reveal severely negative information about themselves