Rumor has it: CEO gender and response to organizational denials

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).