The modern society, crisis is an inevitable issue to all kinds of organizations. Crisis is a major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome affecting an organization, industries and publics. It interrupts normal business transactions and can som...
The modern society, crisis is an inevitable issue to all kinds of organizations. Crisis is a major occurrence with a potentially negative outcome affecting an organization, industries and publics. It interrupts normal business transactions and can sometimes threaten managing relationships with organization's stakeholders.
A negative story is deemed more newsworthy than a positive one. That is why crisis is an attractive source of media stories. Speedy media easily bring those critical issue and make small issue to very serious one.
Therefore it is necessary to planning for a crisis or negative issue and remove some of the risk or negative occurrence. That is crisis management. It allows the organization to be in greater control of its own destiny. Effective crisis management includes crisis communication that not only can alleviate or eliminate the crisis, but can sometimes bring the organization a more positive reputation than before the crisis.
Each organization has their own types of crises and need to control different ways.
The purpose of this studies is to research what crisis types occur and what crisis reponses apply in korean organization. In addition bring the necessity of crisis communication in korean organization.
This study divided organizations into private and public using differences between two purpose of foundation, legal sanction, political character. These organizations must be affected by different types of crisis. To research, selected TV, newspaper and internet's top media KBS, Chosun-Ilbo and Ohmy news from January 2004 to August 2005.
The study results are summed up as follows;
First with regard to crisis types, the types of 'Mis-management', 'White collar crime', 'Product/Policy defects and recall' were frequently happened. Over 30% of crisis was 'Mis-management'. Private organization's mis-management was included illegal money use, window dressing settlement, unfair trade practices by executives. Public organization's mis-management was included dereliction and neglect of duty. Both organizations suffered from intentional crisis caused by inside organization and those crises could be controled and managed.
Second with regard to reponses according to the level of responsibility by Coombs. Both organizations did not response intentionally or unintentionally in a crisis. Mostly organizations applied 'non-acception' strategy. They did not care the public perceives to know what the truth was.
Third with regard to the responses of crisis types, both organizations frequently applied 'non-acception' and 'excuse/justify' to the intentional crisis caused by inside organization. On the contrary organizations applied 'excuse/justify', 'corrective action', 'ingratiation' to the unintentional crisis.
Following the Coombs theory, high responsibility crisis adapts accommodative communication and low responsibility crisis adapts defensive communication to make good relationship with publics. But Korean organizations mostly applied defensive response to the high responsibility crisis and accommodative response to the low responsibility crisis.
Finally both private and public organization reported on media evaluated as not to be conducted systematical and strategical crisis communication.
Few months ago there was a news on TV that a government agency set up the crisis manual plan. Whether an organization is a large multinational company or very small, a crisis communication plan is needed.
Crisis is shortened word of 'threaten' and 'opportunity'. Every organization and individual can get through crisis circumstance. Effective crisis communication will help to make positive relationship with publics and good reputation.