Investigating Stakeholders’ Reactions to Crises in the Nonprofit Sector Through the Lens of Social Identity Theory

ABSTRACT

Social identity theory (SIT) suggests that organizations fulfill stakeholders’ psychological needs by meeting their self-definitional needs. Different crises may undermine such psychological fulfillment to varying degrees and lead stakeholders to react differently to the crises. This study examined the intersection of SIT and crisis communication in the context of social-cause-related nonprofit organizations (NPOs). It used the concept of identity threat to investigate whether a crisis is more detrimental when it directly compromises an NPO’s organizational identity and whether this effect varies depending on the stakeholders’ levels of social-cause involvement. Data were collected from 630 participants in an online between-subject experiment. As the study found, a crisis that directly compromises an NPO’s identity does more damage to stakeholders’ identification, attribution of responsibility, attitudes, and intentions of negative word-of-mouth than a crisis that does not. However, this effect of crisis types disappears among stakeholders with low social-cause involvement. Additionally, stakeholder-NPO identification mediates the interaction effects of crisis types and social-cause involvement on the attitudinal and intentional outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis communication
• identification
• identity threat
• nonprofit
• social identity theory
• social-cause involvement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This study reports the results from the combined data for four reasons: (1) The results from the disaggregated data were very consistent with each other and consistent with the combined data. (2) The three-way ANOVA where social-cause type was included as an IV showed that the three-way interaction was not statistically significant and therefore the effects of the two-way interaction between crisis types and stakeholders’ social-cause involvement did not vary depending on the social-cause type. (3) It is acceptable in public relations literature to merge data and still enhance the external validity (e.g., Zhao, Zhan, & Ma, 2020). (4) The author did a power analysis based on the effect sizes shown in this study, and it would need above 450 participants for each social cause to achieve a power of 0.80 if the analysis were disaggregated. Combining the data thus allows the study to achieve enough statistical power at an affordable spending rate on data collection. For these four reasons, the author found combining the data to be methodologically acceptable, making the study’s results stronger and their interpretation easier.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Research and Creative Activities Fund of Texas Christian University [60816].