No greater sacrifice: American airlines employee crisis response to the September 11 attack

This case study reports the identification strategies and related tactics that American Airlines CEO Don Carty and his team of professional communicators used in their employee crisis response to the September 11 attack. Data analyzed in the study include 78 internal documents; 10 articles from the airline's corporate newspaper; and interviews with Timothy Doke, then American Airlines Vice President of Corporate Communications, and Andrea Rader, a senior member of Doke's team. The results of this study provide guidance to corporate communicators tasked with rebuilding employee morale after a malevolent-type crisis.