Why Saying “I'm Sorry” Isn't Good Enough: The Ethics of Corporate ...

Ethics Corporate Apologies
after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Japanese people clearly wanted TEPCO
executives to specify precisely what they were going to do to get the radiation under
control. Even if the apology by TEPCO’s CEO had been textbook perfect in other
respects, it might still have failed to restore trust with many recipients because it simply
was not clear after the fact how and whether the effects of the disaster could be lessened,
much less reversed. Trust needs to be restored because harm has been done by the firm;
some of that harm can be viewed as voluntary (e.g., TEPCO executives’ early choice to
defer some containment measures because they wanted to preserve the economic value of
the plants). xvi However, no one knows exactly how to remedy the primary ongoing harm-
-continuing emissions of radiation into the atmosphere and sea. At this juncture, making
an ethically good apology containing all of the elements specified above may be close to
impossible.
We must also remember that CEOs do not get to choose their audience. How a given
audience construes itself will affect how the apology is heard and how persuasive it
ultimately turns out to be. Fehr and Gelfand’s (2010) experiments suggest that listeners
who are especially relationship-centered want to hear ample evidence of the speaker’s
empathy with those harmed; apology recipients who are more individualistic want to hear
more from the apologizer about compensation. So, although I would argue that ethically
good apologies tend to possess many or all of the above elements, some elements of the
apology may need to be stronger or more developed for certain audience members.
Cultural differences affect what an audience will accept as a genuine apology: “Japanese
apologies are more apt to communicate submissiveness, humility, and meekness whereas
Americas are more apt to communicate sincerity” (Lazare, 2005, 33). Placing tremendous
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