What is it?

Some caveats

What we know

What we think

What we don’t know

• Studied by lot of different disciplines

• Used to mean different things

• A lot of different and related literatures

...so what is reputation?

• Audience-specific

• Multidimensional

– Being known

– Being known for something

– Generalized favourability

• Benefit of the doubt/credibility

• More attractive for joint ventures

• Perceived as a less risky investment

• Greater market dominance

• Higher accounting performance

• Can protect you when bad things happen

A good reputation can be useful...

• Good reputations can also hurt:

– Targeting by activists

– Higher expectations

• Downsizing hurts reputation, even when analysts suggest it

• People see and focus on different things

• Rankings recreate rankings

• Most work has been on “good” reputations

• Most work on Fortune’s Most Admired Companies list

• A lot of work is theoretical

• Anticipatory impression management can help

• Two different types of reputations...

– Reputations may grow and decline in different ways

– Different tactics might help for different types of reputations

• Cross-level effects

• Bad reputations

• Unintended consequences

• Audience effects

• Cognitive and psychological effects

• Reputation versus reality

• Industry, firm, executives

• Coherence across levels

Executives

Firm

Industry

• Lasting effects?

• Building versus repairing?

• Damaging or constraining nature of good

• Beneficial or enabling nature of bad

• Coherence vs. disagreement within and across audiences

• Clusters?

• Power and politics

• Associations between cues and evaluations

• Cognitive evaluations vs. emotional reactions?

• When are reputations tightly coupled with reality?

• When are reputations very different from reality?

• What can be done to decrease or increase this gap?

• Does reputation matter in all situations?

• How much do reputations matter?

• How much should you spend to improve a reputation?