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The leader’s reputation as an indicator of organizational performance
Abstract
The leader’s reputation is an integral part of the organization’s success and affects the company’s perception by various stakeholders in a competitive economic environment. The leader’s reputation is formed through the actions and decisions of the leadership, considering different managerial approaches. The article studies the urgent problem of forming and managing the leader’s reputation in modern economic instability and increased market competition. The authors analyze various elements that define the leader’s reputation, such as his professional ethics, ability to make decisions in conditions of uncertainty, ability to create a motivating environment for employees, etc. The study focuses on the relationship between the leader’s reputation and the organization’s success, where the leader’s reputation is an essential factor influencing the company’s perception. Also, the paper notes that managing the leader’s reputation becomes a necessary element of strategy in a highly competitive environment, where every aspect of interaction with stakeholders can determine the success or failure of the enterprise. The article considers management components of the leader’s reputation and common mistakes in forming a favorable leader’s reputation. The authors proposed a comprehensive study of the role of the leader’s reputation in the modern economic environment. They provided practical recommendations for managing reputation to achieve organizational success and stability. The article analyzes the influence of the leader’s reputation on some organizational components that form the enterprise’s efficiency. The paper provides aspects of the leader’s reputation directly affecting the organization’s effectiveness. The article emphasizes the importance of responsibility and the attentive attitude of the leader to the positive reputation formation of an organization and its perception as an indicator of successful management and development.
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Due to globalization expansion, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is no longer an
unfamiliar concept in emerging markets. In the case of Vietnam, its implementation will
be influenced by several factors, including ethical leadership. Drawing upon the
stakeholder theory, this study develops and tests a serial mediation model to explain
how CSR and firm reputation can connect ethical leadership to enhanced firm performance. The PLS-SEM results from survey data collected from 653 mid- and top-level managers from large companies in Vietnam indicate that ethical leadership
positively influences CSR, which, in turn, results in enhanced firm reputation and firm
performance. This study contributes to research on the intersection between CSR and
leadership in the context of emerging markets. This study also provides some
managerial implications for Vietnamese firms striving to promote ethical leadership to
achieve CSR outcomes.
Most of the existing business models cannot meet the requirement for high instability or consider potential crises underlying the business environment. As a result, many traditional business models have been changed partially or even completely in face of a crisis. Especially, the crisis of credibility may pose an impact on the business activities of the enterprise and even cause a devastating consequence. However, effective leadership can reduce this impact and help the enterprise gain consumer acceptance. This paper, through a critical literature review methodology, explores ‘how’ leadership underpins corporate reputation in a crisis situation reviewing also the key factors influencing leadership effectiveness in such stressful situations. The study concludes that the leadership role is important in supporting the corporate reputation in a crisis situation, a good reputation helps corporations to gain the trust of consumers and reduce the losses caused by the crisis, enterprises in crisis should choose appropriate leadership style so that leaders to create a culture that could predict threats and risks, to incorporate crisis management practices into operations, and to integrate potential risk and vulnerability assessments into the process of strategic debate and planning to prevent reputational damage.
This article explores the relationship between internal reputation management, HRM, and employee voice. Drawing on qualitative data from 25 medium-size and large Norwegian organizations, we find that organizations pursue a desired reputation through a single, official corporate voice by discouraging prohibitive employee voice through technocratic control and coercive HRM practices. The emphasis on technocratic control and coercive HRM occurs despite the widely held belief in reputation and branding literatures that employees should be committed corporate ambassadors who enthusiastically promote their organization's desired reputation and deeply believe in the images they convey to internal and external stakeholders. The findings contribute to studies on reputation management by linking internal reputation management, HRM, and employee voice, pointing out “people management” aspects of reputation management and highlighting important organizational and employee-based consequences.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the different approaches to the corporate reputation construct, in order to identify a comprehensive definition that can be used for measurement purposes, gaps identified by previous literature identified.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a theoretical essay. The authors analyzed studies that involve the relationship between corporate reputation and organizational performance, and the attributes of national and international corporate reputation ratings.
Findings
The authors identified a more comprehensive definition for the reputation construct, and indicated courses for the construct’s measurement, by considering: the judgment by the stakeholders (internal, suppliers, clients and the financial market); periodical evaluations under different organizational perspectives; attention to theoretical assumptions, among other aspects.
Research limitations/implications
The study is a theoretical paper that presents that the research field has many definitions that cannot be used interchangeably. It indicated how the reputation construct should be operationalized for measurement purposes. This study presented a reflection on the relationship between corporate reputation and performance, showing that it is not a settled topic in the academy.
Practical implications
The study advances the understanding of the reputation construct measurement, considering the adopted definition and the discussion of the attributes of the main ratings on corporate reputation. The adoption of a measurement method that takes into account the definition used in this study and the features of the methodologies discussed will improve the corporate reputation assessment.
Social implications
Literature indicates that a good corporate reputation can affect organizational performance and the inverse relationship is also true. As a social implication, it is extremely relevant to improve the understanding the definition and measurement methods of this construct.
Originality/value
This study discusses one of the most important intangible resources for organizations, contributing to the understanding of the difference between the market value and the book value of public companies. Besides it should be considered that there is one lack of a definition directly related to the measurement of the reputation construct in the literature, a gap in which this study contributes.
With growing evidence of positive relationships between social sustainability and financial performance, there is a critical need for understanding how innovative organizations integrate sustainability and tie theory to practice. The research in this study uses a sample of Fortune 500 firms simultaneously listed in the Newsweek Green rankings, The Corporate Knights Global 100, and the 100 Best Corporate Citizens lists. The analysis from this purposeful sample of leading firms reveals positive relationships between the management of sustainability practices leading to improved social sustainability performance and firm financial performance constructs. The results of this study advance construct and item development involving sustainability management and social sustainability practices while testing relationships to measures of financial performance. Further advances in the field and opportunities for future research involve testing larger cross-sector samples, the development and measurement of social sustainability practices from secondary sources, longitudinal studies, and the evolving nature of organizational performance measurement.
The paper aims to review the dominating literature and recent findings on leadership phenomenon and its role in organizational change. The studies in sphere of strategic management, organizational theories and social development theories were analyzed to reveal the main features of the leadership. A four-element model for leadership change is proposed, mostly based on the mediating role of transformational leader. The change forces are presented as a combination of transformational leader, the change agents, the change operators and the environment (including endogenous and exogenous factors). As an alternative for competition between transformational leaders and transactional leaders, this paper introduces the network leadership, more beneficial in terms of rapid organizational transformation.
The aim of this chapter is to: • Introduce the concept of corporate reputation • Highlight the importance of reputation for organizations as well as for cities and countries. • Underscore the connection between reputation and international human resource management (IHRM) • Emphasise the significance of scale when measuring reputation. • Provide an overview of reputation and its significance for different stakeholders. • Demonstrate how and why reputation is important for talent, international assignees and skilled migrants. Learning Outcomes • Understand what is meant by corporate reputation. • Acknowledge how organizations can benefit and lose from their reputations. • Acknowledge that reputation is closely linked to IHRM • Appreciate how reputation is important for potential, existing and former employees, and how they can shape corporate reputations. • Recognize that international assignees and skilled migrants move to countries, cities and companies because of their reputations, and they can also create and destroy these reputations.
Reputation is thought to differentiate organizations and help explain variability in their performance. A recent study contributed to knowledge about the reputation—performance relationship by depicting reputation as having two dimensions and linking each dimension to the prominence and performance of U.S. business schools. The authors propose an alternative approach that draws on the resource-based view (RBV) wherein reputation is an intangible asset that is composed of complementary and reinforcing relationships whose synergies create causal ambiguities that have positive performance implications. The authors also test a direct effect of faculty experience on prominence. Their results support the merit of the RBV model, indicating that it offers greater explanatory power. The findings suggest that reputation cannot be bought by additive and independent investments. Instead, enhancing a reputation requires managers to carefully nurture interdependencies and complex relationships. The findings also provide new insights about the determinants of business school reputation.
Purpose
To increase understanding of the role of reputation in the corporate social performance (CSP) and financial performance (FP) relationship, including contingencies.
Design/methodology/approach
Stakeholder theory is drawn on to present a model of reputation's role in the contingent CSP‐FP relationship.
Findings
CSP is affected by stakeholders' resource allocation to the organisation. This allocation is based on stakeholders' assessment of the organisation's reputation relative to stakeholders' particular expectations, which may be instrumentally and/or normatively framed. Reputation, therefore, plays a key role in the CSP‐FP relationship. Additionally, the authors propose that the equivocal results of previous research into the CSP‐FP relationship may be partly explained by organisational and market contingencies. Specifically, the authors contend that strategic fit, competitive intensity and reputation management capability moderate the CSP‐FP relationship.
Research limitations/implications
Empirical measurement issues and future research directions are discussed.
Originality/value
This paper increases the understanding of the role of reputation in the CSP‐FP relationship. Owing to its rich pedigree in research in corporate branding and reputation, marketing is uniquely positioned to contribute toward the better understanding of this issue.
The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical framework describing the internal organization of communities of practice in a dynamic perspective. More precisely, we argue that communities of practice adopt some specific patterns of internal organization where some of their members obtain a leadership status. Leaders contribute to cognitive advance of the community of practice by providing members with a consistent and coherent vision of its objectives. We identify two of their attributes as important for allowing them to fulfil their task: informational mimesis and mediation. Finally, we propose a simulation model describing the emergence of leadership as the outcome of a self-organizing process. We find that leaders correspond to members who are characterized by higher levels of activity in the community. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006
This chapter evaluates how key contextual factors and the actions of a new leader's predecessor directly affect assessments of a new leader's resolve. Using another survey experiment, it reveals that only two contextual factors—state reputation and state interest in an issue under dispute—consistently influence leader-specific reputations. The experiment further shows interesting patterns under which these two contextual factors affect leader reputational assessments within the experiment. In particular, it is the state's past actions or communicated interest in an issue under dispute combined with a leader's subsequent statements and behavior that influences leader reputations—echoing the results from the previous chapter. In addition, the experiment demonstrates that perceptions of a new leader's resolve emerge independently of the actions of that leader's predecessor, providing direct evidence to support the underlying assumption of this book's theory that new leaders establish reputations for resolve that are distinct from those of their predecessors and of their states.
Reputational incentives are ubiquitous explanations for war, yet consistent evidence of their effects is elusive for two reasons. First, most work searches for the payment of reputational costs, yet strategic censoring systematically biases observational data against revealing them. Second, the locus of reputation is often ambiguous, yet the choice of leader or state as unit of observation has inferential consequences. Our research design (a) focuses on observable implications of reputational theories in appropriate samples and (b) considers two competing sources of reputational incentives: changes in national leaders and in political institutions. Consistent with our expectations, leadership turnover and regime change are each associated with initially high probabilities that militarized disputes escalate to the use of force before declining over time in the presence of a reasonable expectation of future disputes. Reputations are in evidence, but analysts must look for them in the right place.
It is widely assumed that CEOs shape how people view firms, but the question of how these leaders influence corporate reputations has received little theoretical or empirical attention. This study addresses two core questions in this vein: to what degree do leaders really matter for firm reputation, and which leaders affect their firm's reputation? We develop theory explaining how and why leaders should enter into evaluations of the firms that they lead. Specifically, we propose that CEOs' effects on corporate reputation will depend on leader prominence and on perceptions of leader quality. We thus test hypotheses examining how CEOs' media coverage, industry awards, and outsider standing affect the reputations of their firms. Findings indicate that highly-regarded CEOs enhance their firm's reputations, sometimes substantially, and CEOs who receive negative press coverage damage their firms' reputations. However, CEO prominence alone was not associated with higher firm reputation. We discuss implications for research on top leaders and corporate reputations.
This chapter explores the association among identity, perceived authenticity, and reputation-constructs that are relevant to a marketspace where organizations are competing for attention, a commodity in deficit. In a world saturated with information and fraught with skepticism and distrust, organizations must communicate a clear and consistent identity to gain attention of consumers and stakeholders. A solid organizational identity should contribute to achieve a desired reputation; both identity and reputation should help organizational claims and offerings be perceived as authentic. The chapter focuses on how organizations could build favorable and unique reputations in the minds of consumers and stakeholders by demonstrating consistency with their core values in their claims, actions, and decisions. The main construct that is analyzed is perceived authenticity, which has become a promising construct in public relations and strategic communication.
Executives should not take a reputation for ethical leadership for granted. Based on interviews with senior executives and corporate ethics officers, this article reveals that a reputation for executive ethical leadership rests on two essential pillars: the executive's visibility as a moral person (based upon perceived traits, behaviors, and decision-making processes) and visibility as a moral manager (based upon role modeling, use of the reward system, and communication). Developing a reputation for ethical leadership pays dividends in reduced legal problems and increased employee commitment, satisfaction, and employee ethical conduct. The alternatives are the unethical leader, the hypocritical leader (who talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk), and the ethically neutral leader (who may be an ethical person, but employees don't know it because the leader has not made ethics and values an explicit part of the leadership agenda). The article also offers guidelines for cultivating a reputation for ethical leadership.
Notwithstanding the increasing awareness of the importance of intangible resources for the
success of organisations, there is a paucity of research investigating the impact of contingent
factors on the strategic management of such resources. This research therefore aims to
address this issue by investigating the contingencies which come into play in hospital
organisations. It does so by using a case study approach to examine the impact of industryspecific
and organisation-specific factors on management activities. It was found that factors
such as task complexity and staff profile play a significant role in regulated management contexts
making the adjustment of existing approaches an indispensable task for general managers who
aini to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. The paper contributes to various disciplines.
For example, it contributes to the literature on resource management, by proposing a
framework for the effective management of intangible resources in the light of the impact of
contingent factors.
Reviews the changes that have taken place in the library and information world in recent years, with particular reference to their influence on library and information professionals as they consider their professional self development and careers in the current job market. As many new opportunities have arisen since the late 1990s, so the range of library and information work available has changed considerably and continues to do so. These changes challenge the traditional styles of career management that have been quite satisfactory for librarian and information professionals in the past. A major change in the library/information profession is the decline in the concept of a ‘job for life’ and changes in employment patterns that reflect this situation. It has now become widely accepted that there is no such thing as a completely secure job in the long term and, since library staff no longer feel they should stay in one job with one employer throughout a career, managers should expect this to happen and plan accordingly. External factors, such as the impact of terrorism in the wake of 9/11 and global changes in economics, will impact jobs in all countries. Other variables that impact employment patterns include: jobs that disappear; changing customer expectations; the effect of official policies; the new focus in subject work; new areas of professional work; the rise in importance of reputation management; changing hours of work regulations and ageing workers; and the expanding global village.
This study explored the extent to which a leader who claims to be either exemplary or pragmatic and is revealed to have a reputation for either deception or honesty is perceived to be charismatic, effective, and morally worthy. The effects of message delivery and participants’ scores on the Romance of Leadership Scale (RLS) were also examined. The results revealed that (a) a strong versus weak delivery produced higher ratings of leader charisma and effectiveness; (b) exemplary versus pragmatic self-presentations yielded higher levels of perceived effectiveness and integrity; (c) the strong delivery × ethical reputation combination produced the highest levels of perceived leader effectiveness and integrity; and (d) only high RLS individuals perceived the leader to be most effective when delivery was strong and least effective when delivery was weak.
It is recognised that an organization’s corporate reputation is affected by the actions of every business unit, department and employee that comes into contact with another stakeholder. However, the means by which employees can be directed or encouraged to “live the brand” is an area which has received relatively limited coverage. This article explores the management actions that are required if employees are to support and enhance the organization’s corporate reputation. The study illustrates the pivotal role of staff in the corporate reputation management process and presents ways through which organizations can encourage commitment, enthusiasm and consistent staff behaviour in delivering the brand values.
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