Corporate Communication
Corporate Communication
Corporate Communication is the process to share and receive information and knowledge with internal and key external groups and individuals that have a direct relationship with the corporation. It is concerned with corresponding to suppliers, investors, employees and consumers and implying an importance on encouraging a sense of corporate identity and presenting an unfailing and coherent corporate image. Organizational Communication is the study of sending and receiving messages that create and maintain a system of consciously coordinated activities or forces of two or more people within the organization. It deals with all the problems that arise within an organization and how they go through different channels to communicate their differences.
Corporate Communication has not one but many different meanings. From the text book corporate communication means the function and the process of managing communication between an organization and important stakeholder groups including markets and publics in its environment. The article described corporate communication in a different light, they said that corporation communication is the money making part to the corporation and that was all they were concerned about. In the film The Corporation they portrayed corporate communication as a family, a group of people interacting with each other peacefully inside the organization.
The five image restoration strategies used are denial, evasion and responsibility, reducing the offensiveness of the situation, corrective action and mortification. Denial deals with refusing that the act even occurred, or shifting the blame on someone else so you dont have to take the blame. Evasion and responsibility occurs when the company claims that they were wronged so the company just picks up and evades the situation. Another way in which to evade responsibility is by defeasibility, which points out that the company didnt have control over critical elements of the situation. A third mode is to claim that the incident occurred by accident, and lastly, a company can claim that they meant no offense by the act, that they had good intentions in mind. For reducing the offensiveness of the situation they use the tactics such as bolstering, where they try to diminish the negative effects by concentrating on something good within the company. Minimizing, they try to minimize the effects by stating that the misbehavior wasnt as damaging as it first seemed. Differentiation, where the actor acknowledges the fact of the misbehavior but compares it to even less desired action. Transcendence, when the corporation places the act in a favorable and helpful light and it makes people think that this act had to happen for a greater good. Compensation, where the actor offers something significant to the person that was wronged. Another way to reduce the offensiveness of the situation is by attacking the accusers and reducing their credibility. The fourth strategy is corrective action where the corporation tries to fix the problem. This can happen two ways, one of which you have to restore the corporation back to the way it was before the offensive act took place, and the other way is where you are ensuring that the offensive act wont happen again. The last of the five strategies is mortification, where the corporation admits the offensive act and asks for forgiveness. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina the Louisiana State Government, FEMA and the White House were forced to take action upon the situation that arose. I feel like their best course of action would be to use not one but two restoration strategies. The first strategy being to reduce the offensiveness of the situation. They could try to diminish the horrific events by reporting on how many people they saved and the good that the government brought to the area after the catastrophe. The second strategy I would use would be one of corrective action. It would do the government great good if they could ensure that this situation doesnt happen again and they have taken the right steps and precautions to ensure that this statement is true.
When the crisis broke out on what was happening within Enron the people and the stakeholders reacted in the problematic stakeholders/publics way according to the Position-Important Matrix. Basically none of the stakeholders and employees knew what was happening within the company, when it came out that Enron was going bankrupt everyone was disgusted with how it was run but had little power or pull on the organization as a whole to do anything about the situation. This led to the employees and stakeholders losing their jobs and their savings, while the executives sold their shares and got out scotch free.
By using the Crisis-Type Matrix I deducted that the type of crisis they were in was an Intentional Internal Transgression, meaning that