This document discusses the concept of reputation from various perspectives. It addresses that reputation is audience-specific, multidimensional involving being known and known for something. Having a good reputation can provide benefits like greater market dominance and performance but can also make a company a target. While most work has focused on good reputations, this touches on how reputations may grow and decline differently and require different management tactics. It raises several open questions about how reputation links to different levels like industry, firm and executives as well as its relationship to reality.

2. What is it?
Some caveats
What we know
What we think
What we don’t know

3. • Studied by lot of different disciplines
• Used to mean different things
• A lot of different and related literatures
...so what is reputation?

4. • Audience-specific
• Multidimensional
– Being known
– Being known for something
– Generalized favourability

5. • 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...

6. • 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

7. • Most work has been on “good” reputations
• Most work on Fortune’s Most Admired Companies
list
• A lot of work is theoretical

8. • 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

9. • Cross-level effects
• Bad reputations
• Unintended consequences
• Audience effects
• Cognitive and psychological effects
• Reputation versus reality

10. • Industry, firm, executives
• Coherence across levels
Executives
Firm
Industry

11. • Lasting effects?
• Building versus repairing?

12. • Damaging or constraining nature of good
• Beneficial or enabling nature of bad

13. • Coherence vs. disagreement within
and across audiences
• Clusters?
• Power and politics

14. • Associations between cues and evaluations
• Cognitive evaluations vs. emotional reactions?

15. • 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?