earticle

영어

Social media have emerged as a critical element in the crisis communication process and demand new thinking for organizations facing crises. Stealing thunder is a proactive crisis communication strategy in which an organization voluntarily releases crisis information before it is revealed by a third party such as news media. Although organizations are increasingly using stealing thunder to minimize the impact of crises, little empirical data is available to understand how online users process crises when an organization proactively release the crisis information.Therefore, one objective of the current study was to test the efficacy of stealing thunder and identify attitudinal and behavioral outcome variables in an online context (i.e., Facebook). A second objective was to examine the underlying mechanism of stealing thunder and behavioral outcome variables by testing a serial mediation model. The results in an online experiment showed that Facebook users gave more favorable evaluationswhen a pharmaceutical company proactively released the crisis information (severe side effects of a drug) than when the information was released by Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A serial mediation model revealed that crisis responsibility and organizational reputation serially mediated the relationships between stealing thunder and behavioral outcomes.