To be or not to be sorry? How CEO gender impacts the effectiveness of organizational apologies.

We examine whether consumer reactions to a product failure are affected by the gender of the CEO to whom the organization's postfailure communications are attributed. We find that CEO gender and response type interact to affect both consumers' perceptions of the organization, and their propensity to purchase from it following a product failure. Specifically, consumers' reactions to unqualified apologies versus other types of accommodative...