By Emma Barnhouse, published Fall 2021 & awarded Spring 2022
Peer Reviewed at Abilene Christian University.
Organizations experience crises of all types that pose reputational threats to the organization if not handled properly. Situational crisis communication theory seeks to understand the reputational threat to an organization in crisis and respond to it. There are ten strategies within the theory that organizations may use to respond to a crisis, though the best response is one that considers the type of crisis, the history of crisis, and prior reputation of the organization. When used properly, situational crisis communication theory can help organizations respond to crisis and keeps stakeholders loyal to the organization’s values and goals.
According to Coombs (2019), SCCT can be defined as “[a combination of] instructing and adjusting information to create the ethical base response. SCCT holds that the ethical base response should be the first communication from an organization when the crisis creates or has the potential to create victims,” (p. 174). Once an organization understands the crisis, they use a combination of ten strategies to respond. This theory is an approach studied by Timothy Coombs to better understand how an organization should respond to crisis and uses attribution theory to assess strategies to repair the reputation of the organization.
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By Emma Barnhouse 