Donald Lange

Organizational Reputation: A Review

The idea of organizational reputation is intuitive and simple in its common usage. However, it is surprisingly complex when employed and investigated in management research, as evidenced by the multiple definitions, conceptualizations, and operationalizations that have emerged across studies. The authors see the past decade as a formative phase of the research, characterized by attempts to bring theoretical coherence and rigor to the subject area. In their review of the management literature, the authors focus on this formative period in particular. They attempt to inspire and guide management researchers by clarifying what organizational reputation is. In particular, they identify three dominant conceptualizations, namely, that reputation consists of familiarity with the organization, beliefs about what to expect from the organization in the future, and impressions about the organization’s favorability. The final part of the review is an overview of recent empirical findings in the management literature pertaining to the effects or causes of organizational reputation. The authors conclude by drawing attention to some important directions for future research, including the needs to investigate organizational reputation as multidimensional and dynamic and to model its antecedents and effects as more complex than the unidirectional models typically proposed.

Me or We: The Effects of CEO Organizational Identification on Agency Costs

The corporate governance literature on potential remedies for the agency problem has focused largely on external control mechanisms, especially board independence. We instead consider how an intern...

The Association between Ethics and Stakeholder Theory

Abstract One way of looking at the association between ethics and stakeholder theory – of examining the idea that stakeholder theory has a strong moral foundation – is to consider how the stakeholder approach might in fact be directly driven by and guided by the moral obligations of business. An alternative perspective we offer is that stakeholder theory only indirectly derives from the moral obligations of business, with business purpose serving as a mediating factor. We work through the fairly straightforward logic behind that alternative perspective in this chapter. We argue that it is a better way to think about the association between ethics and stakeholder theory, particularly because it allows for a theoretical and practical distinction between corporate social responsibility and stakeholder theory. Stakeholder theory can thereby continue developing as a theory of strategic management, even as it brings morals to the fore in ways that other approaches to strategic management do not.

A Study of the Effect of Success on Risk Aversion in a Naturally Occurring Experiment

Prospect theorists and behavioral economists argue that a decision maker’s risk-taking behavior is influenced by being in the realm of gains and by being in the midst of a successful decision-makin...

Effects of Conformity to and Deviation from the Crowd:Reputation in the Context of Equity Analysts

Despite the importance of building and maintaining reputations, relatively little research has been devoted to understanding how conformity to or deviation from one’s peers’ actions might affect on...