The ambiguous credibility of online allegations can pose a significant threat to an organization's reputation, relationships with stakeholders, and future performance. As a result, addressing false or misleading allegations has emerged as an important priority among corporate executives. In this research, we examine how CEO gender influences the effectiveness of different types of denial responses in the wake of rumor crises. We find that, after reading damaging allegations about an organization, consumers react more favorably to denials issued by male versus female CEOs. We argue that this is attributable to the dominance that characterizes denial responses, which results in a greater (negative) expectancy violation for female (vs. male) CEOs issuing such statements. Such violations result in lower trust in, and less willingness to do business with, organizations led by women (vs. men) who issue a denial response. We show that these relationships are moderated by increased prescriptive agency (i.e., clarified denials) and the attribution of the response (i.e., to the CEO vs. organization). Taken together, our findings have implications for theory on agentic characteristics, crisis communication, and female leadership, as well as practical implications for how all organizations can adopt more effective crisis responses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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有传言说：CEO 的性别和对组织否认的回应。


在线指控的可信度模棱两可可能会对组织的声誉、与利益相关者的关系以及未来的绩效构成重大威胁。因此，解决虚假或误导性指控已成为公司高管的重要优先事项。在这项研究中，我们研究了 CEO 性别如何影响谣言危机后不同类型否认反应的有效性。我们发现，在阅读了关于组织的破坏性指控后，消费者对男性 CEO 的否认反应比女性 CEO 的反应更积极。我们认为，这归因于否认回应的主导地位，这导致女性（相对于男性）发布此类声明的 CEO 违反了更大的（负面）期望。此类违规行为会导致对女性（相对于男性）领导的组织信任度降低，并且与其开展业务的意愿较低，这些组织会发出拒绝回复。我们表明，这些关系受到增加的规定性代理（即澄清的否认）和响应的归因（即 CEO 与组织）的调节。综上所述，我们的研究结果对代理特征、危机沟通和女性领导力理论具有影响，也对所有组织如何采取更有效的危机应对措施具有实际意义。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。