Limitations
With this paper, we hope to have served a limited purpose: to better understand how leaders exercise ethical leadership in the context of public apologies. We hope that the findings can inform further theorizing and that a community of scholars will eventually develop a comprehensive ethical leadership theory of public apologies. We did not conduct explanatory research of the effects of specific strategies, or of the conditions under which these strategies or effects are realized. As a result, the findings have no explanatory power, and one cannot gauge the relative “success” of the apologies on the basis of the strategies studied. How audiences react to these strategies, and why, remains to be investigated. Additionally, we did not conduct research of “internal” apologies, that is: statements of regret that are offered by leaders within their organizations – e.g., in private chambers before fellow board members or before a crowd of employees, without press camera's running and even mobile recording devices turned off. As a result, it remains unclear if public apologies differ from their private counterparts and if leaders employ (dis)similar strategies in these settings.
