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The Ethics of CEO Apologies
Koehn, Daryl
Koehn, Daryl
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Abstract
The number of corporate apologies has increased dramatically during the past decade. The trend has caught the eye of both rhetoricians and management scholars who have analyzed various corporate apologies, characterizing some as sincere and others as merely ritualistic. The classification schemes used by these analysts tend to be highly schematic—i.e., they focus on the necessary and sufficient logical qualities that an apology must possess in order to qualify as sincere. Another body of management literature overlaps with these logical analyses but focuses on public relations and considers which types of apologies by CEOs are most successful in repairing a firm’s image. The logical and PR analyses are not completely distinct, for an apology by its very nature aims at restoring trust among parties and that restoration may involve damage control. This paper adds several important but overlooked dimensions to the debate by delving into the ethics of CEO apologies. First, rather than just listing traits or features than an apology should have, I ground these features in the nature or essence of an apology. Second, I explore the largely ignored role played by the speaker’s ethos and pathos in genuine or ethical apologies and suggest that attention needs to be paid to the problems “role contamination” poses for CEO apologizers. Third, I conclude by arguing that it likely is not possible to specify all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for an apology to be ethically good. The most one can hope to do is to outline some key aspects of an ideally good apology.
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Conference proceedings
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2012
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With permission of the license/copyright holder