Corporate reputation and reputation risk are becoming increasingly relevant for firms, also caused by its relevance for firm value. In this context, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of ...empirical evidence in the literature regarding the relation between reputation damaging events, corporate reputation, and corporate financial performance, thereby also taking into account stakeholder behavior. The review is also intended to determine to what extent the current literature allows a holistic understanding of these relationships in the sense of the causal chain of events, which is of high relevance when managing reputation and reputation risk. Thus, focus is first laid on empirical evidence regarding the impact of corporate reputation on stakeholder behavior and on financial performance. Next, the event study literature regarding the effect of reputation damaging events on corporate reputation and financial performance is reviewed, and, finally, implications for risk management are discussed along with the need for future research.
Corporate reputation is critical for cultivating stakeholder relationships and, specifically, for regaining public trust. Corporate reputation results from the firm's interactions with stakeholders, ...emphasizing the important role employees play in reputation management. However, employees are not necessarily aware of, or prepared for, this extra-role assignment, indicating a gap in research and a managerial challenge. The purpose of the present article is to identify how employees' awareness of their impact on their employers' reputation is influenced by pride, job satisfaction, affective commitment, and perceived corporate reputation. An online survey of employees working for firms ranked in Fortune's America's Most Admired Companies Index provides empirical evidence. The findings underline the prominent effect pride in membership has regarding employees' awareness of their impact on corporate reputation. Study findings further deliver insights into opportunities and risks for managers who wish to use internal reputation building strategies to enhance corporate reputation.
Responsible supply chain management (RSCM) can help protect a firm's corporate reputation by shielding it from negative media attention and consumer boycotts. RSCM can also enhance a firm's corporate ...reputation, which allows firms to secure business contracts and penetrate new market segments successfully. This study empirically examines: (i) the extent to which responsible supply chain management practices is driven by a desire to protect corporate reputation; and (ii) whether responsible supply chain management can enhance corporate reputation and thereby generate competitive advantage to the firm. We draw on primary and secondary datasets across seven firms, spanning the publishing, technology, beverage, tobacco, finance and home improvement sectors. We find compelling evidence to suggest that firms often engage in RSCM due to a desire to protect corporate reputation. Similarly, we find empirical evidence to suggest that responsible supply chain practices can enhance reputation and thereby create competitive benefits, although this link is not as profound as the relationship between RSCM and reputation protection and there are significant variations across industries. These findings have significant implications for marketing theory and, in particular, industrial marketers, who are increasingly expected to implement responsible supply chain practices.
•This study furthers the debate about the strategic role of responsible supply chain management (RSCM).•We explore the extent to which RSCM is driven by a desire to protect reputation.•Our conceptual model explicitly emphasizes that RSCM can play both a reputational protection and enhancement role.•Our study explores a rich dataset, going beyond anecdotal evidence as often offered by prior studies.•Our analytical approach allows us to analyze both hetero- and homogeneity across companies and sectors.
Insufficient research exists on the impact of reputation in online health-care market communities, especially from the multilevel and cross-level perspectives. Based on prior research on individual ...and organizational reputation, we hypothesize multilevel and cross-level reputation determinants of physicians' performance in online health-care market communities. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we analyzed the data of 47,182 physicians from 660 hospitals in a Chinese online health-care market community to test our hypotheses. Our results suggest that the number of physicians' appointments is positively associated with their individual offline and online reputations, as well as the offline and online reputation of the hospital in which the physicians work. We also find that organizational reputation moderates the relationship between an individual's reputation and a physician's performance, in such a way that the hospital's offline reputation increases the importance of physicians' online reputation in promoting the number of physicians' appointments. However, the hospital's online reputation enhances the relationship between physicians' offline reputation and the number of appointments. Our study contributes to existing theories of reputation and the signaling theory, and also provides physicians with guidelines that support them in effectively improving their performance.
Current reputation systems in online (labor) markets are overly positive and unidimensional. This article presents a new reputation framework that combines human input with machine learning to ...provide dynamic, multidimensional, and skill-set-specific quality assessments. The framework significantly outperforms current reputation systems. By providing more representative reputation scores, the framework helps workers to differentiate, employers to make informed decisions, and the market to improve its recommendation algorithms and understand the supply distributions across different dimensions. The framework generalizes in other contexts where reputation systems are overly positive and unidimensional. The framework highlights how combining human input with advanced machine learning techniques can augment intelligence by creating the necessary conditions for humans to make informed decisions. Such systems have the potential to increase efficiency and outcome quality precisely because they intelligently differentiate workers. The deployment of the proposed intelligence augmentation framework in different types of online platforms could have implications for workers, employers, businesses, and the future of work.
Reputation systems in digital workplaces increase transaction efficiency by building trust and reducing information asymmetry. These systems, however, do not yet capture the dynamic multidimensional nature of online work. By uniformly aggregating reputation scores across worker skills, they ignore skillset-specific heterogeneity (reputation attribution), and they implicitly assume that a worker’s quality does not change over time (reputation staticity). Even further, reputation scores tend to be overly positive (reputation inflation), and, as a result, they often fail to differentiate workers efficiently. This work presents a new augmented intelligence reputation framework that combines human input with machine learning to provide dynamic, multidimensional, and skillset-specific worker reputation. The framework includes three components: The first component maps skillsets into a latent space of finite competency dimensions (word embedding), and, as a result, it directly addresses reputation attribution. The second builds dynamic competency-specific quality assessment models (hidden Markov models) that solve reputation staticity. The final component aggregates these competency-specific assessments to generate skillset-specific reputation scores. Application of this framework on a data set of 58,459 completed tasks from a major online labor market shows that, compared to alternative reputation systems, the proposed approach (1) yields more appropriate rankings of workers that form a closer-to-normal reputation distribution, (2) better identifies “nonperfect” workers who are more likely to underperform and are harder to predict, and (3) improves the ranking of within-opening choices and yields significantly better outcomes. Additional analysis of 77,044 restaurant reviews shows that the proposed framework successfully generalizes to alternative contexts, where assigned feedback scores are overly positive and service quality is multidimensional and dynamic.
It has recently been argued that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is ‘political’. It has been neglected however, that firms also operate politically in a traditional sense, in seeking to secure ...favourable political conditions for their businesses. We argue that there are potential synergies between CSR and corporate political activity (CPA) that are often overlooked by firms and that recognition of these synergies will stimulate firms to align their CSR and CPA. We develop a conceptual model that specifies how various configurations of a firm's CSR and CPA – alignment, misalignment, and non‐alignment – affect the firm's reputation beyond the separate reputation effects of CSR and CPA. This model has important implications for understanding how and why firms should pay attention to their CPA and CSR configurations, and thereby contributes to the broader issue of why firms should make sure that they are consistent in terms of responding to stakeholder concerns.
How can we know what stakeholders think and feel about brands in real time and over time? Most brand reputation measures are at the aggregate level (e.g., the Interbrand “Best Global Brands” list) or ...rely on customer brand perception surveys on a periodical basis (e.g., the Y&R Brand Asset Valuator). To answer this question, brand reputation measures must capture the voice of the stakeholders (not just ratings on brand attributes), reflect important brand events in real time, and connect to a brand’s financial value to the firm. This article develops a new social media–based brand reputation tracker by mining Twitter comments for the world’s top 100 brands using Rust–Zeithaml–Lemon’s value–brand–relationship framework, on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. The article demonstrates that brand reputation can be monitored in real time and longitudinally, managed by leveraging the reciprocal and virtuous relationships between the drivers, and connected to firm financial performance. The resulting measures are housed in an online longitudinal database and may be accessed by brand reputation researchers.
Direct relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm performance has been examined by many scholars, but this direct test seems to be spurious and imprecise. This is because ...many factors indirectly influence this relation. Therefore, this study considers sustainable competitive advantage, reputation, and customer satisfaction as three probable mediators in the relationship between CSR and firm performance. The findings from 205 Iranian manufacturing and consumer product firms reveal that the link between CSR and firm performance is a fully mediated relationship. The positive effect of CSR on firm performance is due to the positive effect CSR has on competitive advantage, reputation, and customer satisfaction. The final findings show that only reputation and competitive advantage mediate the relationship between CSR and firm performance. Taken together, these findings suggest a role for CSR in indirectly promoting firm performance through enhancing reputation and competitive advantage while improving the level of customer satisfaction.
Through a meta-analytical approach, we test the antecedents and consequences of corporate reputation, examining specifically the moderating roles of three study variables: country of study, ...stakeholder group, and reputational measure. The study presents a comprehensive overview of three moderating factors for the relationship of corporate reputation with its antecedents and consequences in the literature from 101 quantitative studies. Our findings suggest that practitioners need to exercise considerable caution when developing and managing the reputation of their organizations through the use of research evidence from various countries, with different stakeholder groups and when employing diverse reputational measures.
•We test three moderators for relationships of corporate reputation.•Meta-analytical approach is used to test moderating influences.•Country of study, stakeholder group and reputational measure moderate association of CR with its antecedents/consequences.•Some useful opportunities for further meta-analyses are suggested.
Keren Yarhi-Milo provides an original framework, based on insights from psychology, to explain why some political leaders are more willing to use military force to defend their reputation than ...others. Rather than focusing on a leader's background, beliefs, bargaining skills, or biases, Yarhi-Milo draws a systematic link between a trait called self-monitoring and foreign policy behavior. She examines self-monitoring among national leaders and advisers and shows that while high self-monitors modify their behavior strategically to cultivate image-enhancing status, low self-monitors are less likely to change their behavior in response to reputation concerns. Exploring self-monitoring through case studies of foreign policy crises during the terms of U.S. presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, Yarhi-Milo disproves the notion that hawks are always more likely than doves to fight for reputation. Instead, Yarhi-Milo demonstrates that a decision maker's propensity for impression management is directly associated with the use of force to restore a reputation for resolve on the international stage. Who Fights for Reputation offers a brand-new understanding of the pivotal influence that psychological factors have on political leadership, military engagement, and the protection of public prestige
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