Conceptualizing corporate identity in a dynamic environment

Purpose – The study revisits the meaning of Corporate Identity (CI) in practice to identify its key dimensions and the interrelationships between them, and to provide insights on how to operationalize the construct. Design/methodology/approach – This study is based on a comprehensive literature review and qualitative research consisting of 22 semi-structured interviews with senior managers from 11 UK-leading companies, and three in-depth interviews with corporate brand consultants who worked closely with these firms in cognate areas. Findings – The study identifies six key dimensions of CI in UK industry: communication, visual identity, behavior, organizational culture, stakeholder management, and founder value-based leadership. Research limitations/implications – The focus on UK leading companies limits the generalizability of the results. Further studies should be conducted in other sectors and country settings to examine the relationships identified in the current study. Originality/value – This study identifies the salient dimensions of CI and, for the first time, the role of founder transformational leadership, employee identification and top management behavioral leadership as key dimensions and sub-dimensions of CI. The study also provides novel insights about the measurements for these dimensions. Additionally, this study introduces a model for the interrelationships between CI dimensions and their influence on corporate image, based on rigorous theoretical underpinnings, which lays the foundation for future empirical testing

Lens or prism? How organisations sustain multiple and competing reputations

Purpose: This paper challenges singular definitions, measurements and applications of corporate reputation which tend to be reductionist. We rebuff such narrow representations of reputation by showing the multiplicity of reputation in the case of a global management consulting firm and demonstrate how it has sustained such reputations. Design/methodology/approach: Using a large cross-country qualitative case study based on interviews, focus groups, non-participant observations, workshops and a fieldwork diary, dimensions of reputation are highlighted by drawing on perceptions from multiple stakeholder groups in different geographies. Findings: We find significant differences in perceptions of reputation between and within stakeholder groups, with perceptions changing across dimensions and geographies. Originality/value: The theoretical implications of the research indicate a plurality of extant reputations, suggesting that a prism is more suited to representing corporate reputation than a singular lens-like focus which is too narrow to constitute reputation. This paper offers theoretical and practical suggestions for how global firms can build and sustain multiple and competing corporate reputations

Quick wins to long-term outcomes. An evaluation of Surfwell for promoting the health and wellbeing of police officers

This is the final published version.The report presents an independent evaluation of the effectiveness of Surfwell, an innovative intervention that enables police officers to attend a supervised surfing session with the aim of promoting their wellbeing and mental health. Its unique basis combines the benefits of blue space (sea and waves), and the physical challenges of surfing, with strong peer support.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Building internal reputation from organisational values

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Palgrave Macmillan via the DOI in this recordThe paper enhances micro-cognitive understandings of how organisational values can build internal reputation. Drawing-on a multi-method case study of a private hospital in Malaysia, we show the process of how values are internalised within organisations. We illustrate how different internal actors are important for embedding organisational values at various stages, and show the interplay between them. We show leaders are important for role modelling and engaging, managers are important for embedding and reinforcing, and employees are important for empowering and reciprocating. We argue that in order for values to be internalised, leaders, managers and employees need to effectively create, communicate and enact those values. Rather than values being imposed by a single dominant internal actor, we show that they can be diffused by internal stakeholders at different hierarchical levels. We find that the internalisation of organisational values helps to form positive perceptions of the values and creates individual behaviours that correspond to those values. While the literature has focused on what dimensions and which stakeholders influence reputation building, we show how micro-cognitive processes build internal reputation from organisational values

Leadership development in public service mutuals: a practical guide

This is the final version.This toolkit is designed for senior managers and leaders of organisations who are considering becoming, or who have recently emerged as Public Service Mutuals. Informed by the authors’ recent funded research on building capacity in mutuals, it will help you create engaging and impactful leadership development activities in your evolving organisation

New conceptualization and measurement of corporate identity : evidence from UK food and beverage industry

This study extends the conceptualization of corporate identity (CI), and develops a valid and reliable scale for the concept via multistage research design. After detailed literature review, key elements of CI in practice are clarified using 20 semi-structured interviews with senior managers in leading UK companies, followed by an online survey among senior managers in the UK food and beverage sector. Five dimensions of CI are identified following two-step structural equation modelling: consistent image, top management behavioral leadership, employee identification, mission and values dissemination, and founder transformational leadership. The scale is examined for nomological validity with an outcome variable, namely corporate social responsibility. The contribution is novel, as for the first time CI is empirically validated as a second-order hierarchical construct. The resultant scale guides practitioners to specify priorities when developing CI, acts as a tool to assess the effectiveness of activities over time, and enables corrective action where needed. Keywords: Corporate identityCommunicationVisual identityEmployee identificationLeadershi

Production equilibria

A first version of this paper has been presented at the 11th Conference on Real Analysis and Measure Theory in Ischia (Italy, 2004). This version was presented at the Debreu Memorial Conference in Berkeley (USA, 2005)International audienceThis paper studies production economies in a commodity space that is an ordered locally convex space. We establish a general theorem on the existence of equilibrium without requiring that the commodity space or its dual be a vector lattice. Such commodity spaces arise in models of portfolio trading where the absence of some option usually means the absence of a vector lattice structure. The conditions on preferences and production sets are at least as general as those imposed in the literature dealing with vector lattice commodity spaces. The main assumption on the order structure is that the Riesz-Kantorovich functionals satisfy a uniform properness condition that can be formulated in terms of a duality property that is readily checked. This condition is satisfied in a vector lattice commodity space but there are many examples of other commodity spaces that satisfy the condition, which are not vector lattices, have no order unit, and do not have either the decomposition property or its approximate versions

Harnessing customer mindset metrics to boost consumer spending: a cross‐country study on routes to economic and business growth

The relationship between customer mindset metrics (CMMs) and consumer spending has been extensively investigated at the consumer and firm level, but little is known about it at the national level, nor about how it differs between countries. Drawing on five publicly available datasets gathered in 10 European countries over 20 years, our study traces the connections between three CMMs – customer satisfaction, perceived service quality and loyalty intentions – and consumer spending, as well as examining the moderating cross-country effects of culture, socioeconomic factors, economic structure and political–economic elements. The results show that the CMMs significantly influence consumer spending in all the countries studied, with the effects most pronounced in societies with relatively low education levels, a dominant service sector, fewer barriers to business and international trade and a foundation of survival values rather than self-expressive values. Our findings suggest that CMMs can be used to boost not just business performance but also economic growth, and therefore have significant implications for policymakers as well as practitioners and companies