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Following Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey’s social media post advocating for Hong Kong independence, a 2 (NBA, Houston Rockets) × 3 (attacking the accuser, justification, apology) experimental design was utilized to explore the effects of different crisis response strategies on sports fan relationships between/among a professional sport league, one of its teams, and crisis responsibility attribution. Results indicated that apology strategy functioned better in reducing the blame placed on the organization than attacking strategy. Also, people with a more positive relationship or a higher level of identification with the organization would attribute less responsibility. However, when controlling the organization-public relationship or sport identification, response strategies could no longer predict attribution of responsibility significantly, suggesting that the previous relationship matters more than which response strategy is utilized in a crisis.
Guo et al. (Thu,) studied this question.