The Research Of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) On The Perspective Of Organization-Public Relationships(OPRs)

The world is entering a risking society, and high risk makes crisis become an ordinary state. The Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) is a main research stream in western society, and we Chinese should draw lessens from it and develop it, which can guide the practice in China. Prisent situational crisis communication theory mainly focuses on crisis situation, response strategies, and the matching system of them.Although many researchers bring forward that the relationships between organization and public are very impprtant situational factors, and will affect the response strategies of the organization, no one has empirically tested these points.This research is surrounding four questions:first, does OPRs influence the perception of public on organization crisis responsibility? Does OPRs influence the evaluation of public on organization? Second, will perception of crisis responsibility that public has on organization affect reputation evaluation that public has on organization? Will reputation evaluation affect behavior intention that public has on organization? Third, do crisis response strategies really have effect on organization? Forth, is there really matching response strategy which is most suitable for a certain kind of crisis situation?This research employs controlled experiment method, and selects12groups’ participants in the experiments. Through experiment designing, this research controls situational factors and variables and clearly conceptualizes and operationalizes all variables. This research chooses one cluster form three clusters——accidental crisis cluster. And three relationships state include:positive relationship state, neutral relationship state, negative relationship state. And four crisis response strategies used in this research are scapegoat strategy, excuse strategy, compensation strategy and no response strategy. The research results show that, first, the OPRs indeed influence the perception of crisis responsibility; in positive relationship state, the public has the lowest responsibility perception; in neutral relationship state, the responsibility perception is moderate; in negative relationship state, the responsibility perception is highest. Second, the OPRs indeed affect the reputation evaluation of public; positive relationship state and neutral relationship state have same reputation evaluation, which is higher than negative relationship. Third, perception of crisis responsibility has negative correlation with reputation evaluation, and reputation evaluation has positive correlation with behavior intention. Fourth, the response strategies that organization uses do influence perception of crisis responsibility, reputation evaluation and behavior intention, and the matching strategy is really existing which has the best effect in protecting organization from the crisis.The value of this research embodies on two levels:theory level and practice level. Theory significance includes:first, this research firstly tests all key conclusions of SCCT in China, and supports the universality of SCCT, and also finds that researchers in China should combine the realities of China to develop SCCT. Second, this research chooses the perspective of OPRs, and results show that OPRs have profound influence on main facets of crisis response, and in China, this influence is more evident. These conclusions support relationship management theories, and affirm the positive significance that relationships have on organization operation, which is the base of probing the function relationship on crisis. The practice significance includes, first, the research findings emphasize that organization should construct and maintain positive relationship with public on daily PR practice; second, findings give some suggestions on how to use proper response strategies.