Search results

The purpose of this paper is to identify the rate of recall for new products vs established products and to explore the simultaneous impact of a firm’s reputation and a product’s reputation on the market response to a product recall.

The authors first use an accelerated hazard model to establish that new products are more vulnerable to damage than established products. Once this is established, the authors use a hierarchical linear model to explore the simultaneous impact of the firm and product reputation on the market response to a product recall.

The findings indicate that new products have a greater probability of recall over time than existing products and after a product recall a positive firm reputation can negatively impact the firm and hence becomes a liability. However, when the product is first introduced, the product reputation can help offset any negative market response; the product reputation can therefore be an asset.

New products are more flawed than their established counterparts. A positive reputation can be a liability but a positive product reputation can offset the negative impact of the firm reputation and this is especially pertinent to new products.

The majority of prior research has focused on the reputation and assumed that the firm represented the product as well; the findings of this study reveal that the reputation of the product can have contrasting effects to the reputation of the firm.

Organizational reputation and status are similar yet distinct constructs, serving as signals conveying information about an organization and its products and thus constituting audiences' perceptions about the organization. However, compared to status, reputation tends to change more dynamically over time. In this study, the authors argue that the dynamic traits of reputation – particularly, its momentum and volatility – may serve as additional signals and/or noises, influencing potential exchange partners' perception about the organization and thereby determining its status.

The authors test our hypotheses in the context of the US venture capital firms between 1990 and 2010. The authors collected 8,793 firm-year observations of 1,186 VC firms and used the Arellano–Bover/Blundell–Bond dynamic panel estimation method to estimate their model.

The authors’ findings show that reputation momentum has a positive effect on status, whereas reputation volatility does not have a significant direct effect. However, the authors found that volatility has indirect effects on status, serving as a noise weakening the signaling effects of reputation and its momentum.

This paper contributes to the literature on organizational reputation and status by suggesting the importance of considering the dynamic traits of organizational reputation, which are indeed the crucial factors that distinguish reputation from status. Also, this study provides managerial implications for the organizations that aim to enhance their status through managing their reputation.

Performance feedback theory (PFT) has informed analyses in numerous national contexts and has been used to explain various business and management activities of firms. Stemming from behavioral theory and grounded in a cognitive perspective, which views organizational actions as being the results of decisions produced by groups of individual decision-makers, PFT research has mostly assumed the universal nature of cognition and decision-making processes. However, PFT also presumes that individual decision-makers bring with them different backgrounds and experiences. Hence, this paper offers propositions on how cultural differences in individualism-collectivism influence the major components of PFT, including the formation and revision of performance goals (aspiration levels), and search behaviors and risk preferences in response to gaps between goals and actual performance. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

This paper offers theoretical propositions for the above purpose.

This is not an empirical analysis.

By integrating the individualism-collectivism differences framework into the PFT model, the authors answer previous calls to integrate concepts and frameworks from other theories into PFT while considering the role of cultural differences in aspiration-consequence relationships. Additionally, much of PFT research has focused on outcomes, while actual internal processes have remained unobserved. By focusing on how cultural differences influence various PFT processes, this conceptual analysis sheds light on the unobserved bounds of decision-makers' cognitions.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the circumstances in which a crisis response strategy can compound a crisis, especially a corporate scandal, as evidenced by the case of AWB Limited, where the organisational damage of the “cover‐up” escalated the scandal further and caused additional damage to the company.

The AWB case study provides a unique insight into the application of theories and research on crisis and reputation management and the specific challenges and risks of corporate scandals.

As a specific form of crisis, corporate scandals can easily descend into a secondary or “double crisis” if incorrectly managed, or even mismanaged.

The paper shows that the information provided to the Australian Government's Royal Commission and other documents relating to the management of the scandal by the company further embarrassed AWB and exposed the inappropriateness of the original defensive apologia crisis response strategy pursued by the company.

The AWB case study provides an opportunity for alignment with the crisis response theories of Coombs and De Maria, based on the evaluation of the initial failed response strategy and the more appropriate response eventually undertaken by the company.

The paper offers the additional insights of the author (as a former member of the management team at the company) into the documents tendered to the Royal Commission, which have not been evaluated and studied for their contribution to crisis communication and crisis management.