After a mistake: is an apology enough to restore trust?
A service failure can cast doubt on a team’s expertise, but also on its honesty. The management question is specific: after an acknowledged mistake, how should an apology and corrective action be combined to make trust possible again?
What the literature establishes
Peter H. Kim, Donald L. Ferrin, Cecily D. Cooper and Kurt T. Dirks (2004, Journal of Applied Psychology) compared the effects of apology and denial in response to allegations concerning competence or integrity. In their experimental setting, apology repaired trust more effectively than denial when competence was questioned; the relationship reversed when the allegation concerned integrity. A message is therefore not assessed independently of the kind of failure the recipient believes they have observed.
Words tested by subsequent actions
Maurice E. Schweitzer, John C. Hershey and Eric T. Bradlow (2006, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) examined trust recovery after untrustworthy behaviour, with and without deception. In their experiment, a sequence of trustworthy actions allowed trust to recover, but prior deception prevented full recovery, even with a promise and an apology. The useful distinction is between announcing a correction and giving the other person observable reasons to believe in it.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that managers should apologise for technical mistakes and deny any wrongdoing involving integrity. That would turn an experimental finding about perceptions into a communication formula, disregarding facts and responsibilities. When wrongdoing is established, the issue is not choosing the most advantageous wording, but acknowledging precisely what happened without promising more than the organisation can deliver. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings cannot promise
These experiments reproduce neither the duration of a professional relationship nor the obligations specific to healthcare or hydropower operations. They cannot establish a universal timeframe for trust recovery or justify treating reported satisfaction as evidence of lasting repair. In practice, assessing the quality of an apology without checking subsequent commitments means evaluating the words separately from the problem.
A practical check in Sion
Within SHR’s Communication programme, an exercise in Sion could address a non-critical service incident in hydropower, healthcare, winegrowing or Alpine tourism, without replacing safety and reporting procedures. For each selected incident, record the acknowledged fact, the corrective commitment, its owner and its deadline, then check at that deadline whether the action was completed and the recipient informed. The indicator is the proportion of commitments due for which both completion and communication are documented: it checks follow-through on apologies, not trust itself. To go further: explore the Communication training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Communication in Sion
- communication
- Sion
- research
- training sion