No Greater Sacrifice: American Airlines Employee Crisis Response to the September 11 Attack

Abstract

This case study reports the identification strategies and related tactics that American Airlines CEO Don Carty and his team of professional communicators used in their employee crisis response to the September 11 attack. Data analyzed in the study include 78 internal documents; 10 articles from the airline's corporate newspaper; and interviews with Timothy Doke, then American Airlines Vice President of Corporate Communications, and Andrea Rader, a senior member of Doke's team. The results of this study provide guidance to corporate communicators tasked with rebuilding employee morale after a malevolent-type crisis.

Keywords:

• Airlines
• American Airlines Inc
• Communication in Management
• Crisis Management
• Identification
• September 11 Attack
• Terrorism

A previous version of this manuscript was a “Top 3” paper at the 2004 National Communication Association Conference in Chicago, IL.

A previous version of this manuscript was a “Top 3” paper at the 2004 National Communication Association Conference in Chicago, IL.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Al Becker, Mick Doherty, Timothy Doke, King Douglas, Roger Frizzell, Sue Gordon, Marty Heires, John Hotard, Tim Kincaid, William Mitchell, Andrea Rader, Lisa Singleton, Tim Wagner, Gus Whitcomb, and other (current and past) American Airlines employees who were gracious in their support of the project. The author would also like to thank the two external reviewers for their helpful, detailed, and constructive feedback on the manuscript. Vanessa Beasley, Lynne Cooke, Maria Dixon, Carl Kell, Lauren Leahy, Owen Lynch, and Jaime Noble Gassmann also provided valuable editorial comments.

Notes

A previous version of this manuscript was a “Top 3” paper at the 2004 National Communication Association Conference in Chicago, IL.

1. Cheney (1983a, 1983b) and Tompkins and Cheney (1985) extended Kenneth Burke's (1950) work to explain the communicative function of identification.

2. Excluded from the analysis were all messages that focused on the anthrax scare in October 2001, airline industry news not related to 9/11, human resources content (such as employee promotions or benefits information), union activities, and summaries of national newspaper articles that frequently appeared in Jetwire messages.

3. Mechanical failure is still being investigated as the cause of the AA 587 accident. The circumstances surrounding the accident would have provided an obvious set of confounding variables to my analysis. Consequently, employee messages created by management after November 12, 2001, are not used.

4. These included informational e-mails from the Human Resources, Corporate Communications, or Informational Technology departments within the airline. Permission from American Airlines was granted to reprint each of the quotations included in this article. The reader should also note that a number of internal employee communication publications are controlled by frontline communicators within the airline. These are not sponsored by the Corporate Communications, Human Resources, or Information Technology staff and, therefore, were not included in the sample.

5. I used Roderick Hart's (2000) Diction 5.0 content analysis software to operationalize the “assumed we” strategy. I isolated all messages from the population of documents attributed to Don Carty. I then input these messages (totaling 10,338 words) into the software program. I found that “we” was used 274 times, “us” 49 times, and “our” 278 times. These three personal pronouns represented 6% of the total number of words (10,338) in that smaller sample of messages.

6. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press surveyed 1,200 adults over September 13–17, 2001. The study reported that Americans suffered “a heavy psychological toll” from the attack and that “71% have felt depressed, nearly half have difficulty concentrating, and one-in-three report having trouble sleeping at night” (Pew Research Center, 2001, ¶ 1).

7. In the third quarter of 2001, American Airlines reported a $922 million loss. This was its worst quarterly loss ever and was close to as much as it lost in its worst year (Carty, 2001).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joe R. Downing

Joe R. Downing is Assistant Professor in Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University