To Apologize, or not to Apologize? That is a Question - How Should an Organization Respond to Executive Employees’ Private Life Misconducts?

Crisis is a low-probability but high-impact phenomenon that hurts an organization’s credibility and reputation (Pearson and Clair, 1998). Crisis can result from employees’ misconducts in the workplace (e.g., employee making racist comments on customers; Coombs and Schmidt, 2000), and beyond (e.g., executive abusing child in private life; Johnson, Folks, and Wang, 2018). While research has looked into the effectiveness of response strategies in dealing with workplace employee misconducts, there has yet been any discussion upon appropriate responses to non-workplace misconducts, seemingly assuming the same strategies can be taken. This research aims to fill this gap. Among the many response strategies to crisis, apology and apologia are frequently compared and discussed (Bradford and Garrett, 1995; Dutta and Pullig, 2011). By definition, apology refers to admissions of responsibility and showing regret about the unwanted event (Hargie, Stapleton, and Tourish, 2010), whereas apologia is about denial of responsibility and relevance to the event (Tsarenko and Tojib, 2015). When an employee’s misconduct happens within the workplace, where the firm is expected to have control over employee behaviours, it is unlikely for the firm to shred or deny its responsibility in the event. As a result, apology can help attenuate the advert effects of misconduct (Coombs and Schmidt, 2000). When responding to employee misconducts happening beyond the workplace, however, whether to use apology or apologia depends on the extent to which the organization is perceived to be responsible for the event. Although an organization usually has no control over its employee’s private life behaviour, there are reasons to believe that it could still get scrutinized for responsibilities, and this is particularly true for employee misconducts that violate an organization’s core value.