Easy Innovation and the Iron Cage: Best Practice, Benchmarking, Ranking, and the Management of Organizational Creativity

The use of what came to be known as best practices, benchmarking, and ranking, which took corporate America by storm in the 1980s as a method for managing innovation, has seeped into government and nonprofit organizations in the intervening years. In fact, as H. George Frederickson demonstrates in this Kettering Foundation occasional paper, these practices have proven to be counterproductive both in the business and the public sector. Frederickson suggests, instead, a more flexible, less directive, model he calls "sustained innovation." He offers abundant evidence that this model is more effective in producing organizational effectiveness

The moderating influences on the relationship of corporate reputation with its antecedents and consequences: a meta-analytic review

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 overviewof threemoderating 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

Conformist innovation:An institutional logics perspective on how HR executives construct business school reputations

In this paper, we explore whether Legge’s classic 1970s criticism of human resource (HR) executives as ‘conformist innovators’ is still relevant. Drawing on institutional logics, we analyse HR managers’ rationales for choosing particular university business schools to provide senior executive development. Our mixed-methods study demonstrates that senior HR managers socially construct and enact business school reputations by drawing on strategic rationales. These rationales are embedded in societal, field and organizational logics, especially the extant reputational rankings of international business schools and an ‘ideal’ template of elite business schools. We find that these rationales, and the decisions they evince, tend to confirm the traditional picture of conformist innovation among HR executives. We discuss the implications for the reputation of HR as a profession, their employers and business schools

The formation of organizational reputation

In this article, we review four decades of research on the formation of organizational reputation. Our review reveals six perspectives that have informed past studies: a game theoretic, a strategic, a macro-cognitive, a micro-cognitive, a cultural-sociological, and communicative one. We compare and contrast the different assumptions about what reputation is and how it forms that characterize these perspectives, and we discuss the implications of these differences for our theoretical understanding of stability and change, control and contestation, and the micro-macro relationship in the complex process of reputation formation

The moderating influences on the relationship of corporate reputation with its antecedents and consequences: a meta-analytic review

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 overviewof threemoderating 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

An investigation on the socio-cognitive foundations of reputation robustness

Scholars have consistently found that a positive reputation can lead to many benefits for organizations (e.g., Cable & Turban, 2003; Deephouse, 2000; Rindova et al., 2005; Roberts & Dowling, 2002), thereby constituting a fundamental resource for competitive advantage (Barney, 1991). As a result, academics have advocated for a better understanding of what makes reputations stable to the effects of negative events and/or information (e.g., Carter & Ruefli, 2006; Flanagan & O’Shaughnessy, 2005; Love & Kraatz, 2009). However, despite such an acknowledgement, we still know relatively little about what makes a firm’s reputation resistant to new events or information, apart from the fact that highly positive reputations are likely to be more resistant (Coombs & Holladay, 2006; Flanagan & O’Shaughnessy, 2005; Love & Kraatz, 2009). To date, scholars who have examined similar topics have looked at reputation stickiness (e.g., Schultz et al., 2001), meaning stability over time in absence of disruptions, and reputation resilience (Rhee & Valdez, 2009), referring to the ability of the reputation to recover after disruptions. This dissertation can be positioned in relation to these two other terms as I look at the stability of a firm’s reputation in the presence of events and/or information that can potentially change it. In this regard I use the term reputation robustness. After an initial chapter reviewing the literature on organizational reputation, this dissertation comprises three other chapters investigating different facets of the same phenomenon. In chapter two, I introduce the concept of reputation robustness in order to help explain why the reputation of some organizations is more robust against negative events than the reputation of other organizations. By building on a review of extant reputation research, I identify two sets of factors that are relevant for the understanding of reputation: cognitive and contextual factors. Starting from this review, I put forward a series of propositions on the role of the identified factors in moderating the effect of negative events on stakeholders’ reputation judgments and explain how this improves our understanding of reputation management. In chapter three, I elaborate on the role of familiarity in making people’s reputation judgment more robust in light of new information and investigate such a relationship empirically through two experiments. Results lend support for the hypothesis that familiarity mitigates the effect of both positive and negative information on people’s reputation judgments. The fourth chapter focuses on the role of ambivalence in moderating the effect of new information, but also more generally in influencing the way in which new information regarding an organization is interpreted. Through one experiment, I find that the reputation judgments of highly ambivalent people are more influenced by new information. At the same time, I find that highly ambivalent people use new information to reduce their sense of ambivalence toward the focal organization, when possible. Overall, this dissertation contributes to research on organizational reputation by improving the understanding of the variables influencing reputation’s robustness to new events or information. In particular, the findings demonstrate that there is more to reputation than its level (whether bad or good) that might cause it to be more or less robust, as suggested by extant research. As discussed in the thesis, these variables are related to stakeholders’ cognitive and contextual characteristics and go beyond the ability of the organization to consistently deliver a positive performance

Stakeholder Perceptions of a University Response to Crisis

The purpose of this study was to contribute to current theory-driven research in crisis communication by examining the perceptions of multiple stakeholder groups to a university crisis response strategy. Two main questions were examined in this dissertation. The first question attempted to determine if a significant difference existed between stakeholder groups and their perception of university reputation, responsibility for the crisis, and potential supportive behaviors toward the university following the university’s response to a crisis. The second asked if Coombs’s Situational Crisis Communication Theory is a practical application for universities. The participants were from 4 stakeholder groups associated with a regional public university: students, faculty, staff, and alumni. An online survey was sent to participants via email. The data analysis revealed significant differences in the perceptions of reputation and in the potential supportive behaviors between staff and faculty and between staff and students. Staff perceived the reputation more favorably and had more favorable potential supportive behaviors than both the faculty and the student stakeholder groups. The results of this research provided empirical evidence that distinct stakeholder groups do perceive crisis response strategies differently. It also supported the application of Situational Crisis Communication Theory in a university setting

Impact of College Rankings on Institutional Decision Making: Four Country Case Studies

Examines how global or national rankings influence colleges' strategic positioning and planning, staffing and organization, quality assurance, resource allocation and fundraising, and admissions and financial aid in Australia, Canada, Germany, and Japan