Culpable leaders, trust, emotional exhaustion, and identification during a crisis.

Descriptive statistics and correlations between variables analyzed in SPSSe.g. Linear regression, SPSS Harmon’s single factor method.

Qualitative/quantitative research - Survey

Variables measured: Judgements of leader responsibilityJudgments of external stakeholders’ responsibilityTrust toward leadersEmotional exhaustionOrganizational identificationControl variables

three-year old, not-for-profit organization that provided educational entertainment to its visitors.The organization had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy because, despite initial high attendance, the number of paying customers declined and the organization was not able to pay its debts to the bondholders and the city that had funded the organization.

Using the survey method the authors collected data from 354 individuals from an organization that filed for bankruptcy [out of 628 contacted individuals]conducted a survey, and collected both quantitative and qualitative data, approximately three months after the organization filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.The number of used survey was 335

The purpose of this paper is to investigate followers’ judgments of the culpability of their leaders and the organization’s external stakeholders in causing a crisis.

A limitation of our study is that it is cross-sectional in nature and we were not able to study the effects of followers’ judgments of responsibility on trust, emotional exhaustion, and organizational identification over time.

It appears that in situations of perceived leader culpability during a crisis, followers tightly couple their leaders with the organization as a whole. In contrast, their judgments that external stakeholders were culpable were associated with increased trust toward their leaders, increased organizational identification, and they had no relationship with their levels of emotional exhaustion.

survey method to collect data from 354 individuals from an organization that filed for bankruptcy.