The objective of this article is to present the results of the research that aimed to understand the relationships between organizational reputation and business competitiveness in organizations in the department of Risaralda (Colombia), these were: Technological University of Pereira (UTP), Empresa de Energía de Pereira (EEP), Empresa Aguas Aguas de Pereira (A A). The research resorted to a mixed sequential approach with a preponderance of quality, using bibliometric and scientific mapping techniques for the construction of the state of the art, one of the contributions of the article, as well as surveys and interviews with some of the interest groups of these organizations. The results show that organizational reputation is expressed in the selections made by its leaders and in the perception that its stakeholders have of this issue, this is configured as a factor that explains its competitiveness. The qualitative and quantitative findings, as well as the review of the official platforms and the contrast with the programs and activities they carry out, allow us to affirm that these organizations create value for and with the communities and stakeholders consulted, as well as improve their possibility of remaining. It is concluded that for external stakeholders the most important dimension in this relationship is the quality of the product and service, while for internal stakeholders it is leadership in the organizational culture. Research provides evidence that shows that a better reputation leads to lasting and strong relationships and bonds.
While the importance of value co-creation has been well established, prior research has predominantly adopted a single-customer perspective, with limited attention to dual-perspective analyses. This study addresses this gap by employing paired data collected from frontline service personnel and their customers to examine how value is (co-)created during service processes. Data were collected from 71 service personnel and 162 customers in professional service contexts (e.g., banking), and analyzed using SmartPLS 4.0. Findings: (1) co-production has stronger effects on employee engagement than on employer branding; (2) employee engagement is a primary driver of employee loyalty and serves as a mediating mechanism between co-production and employee loyalty; (3) employee loyalty does not significantly influence customer loyalty, whereas customer value creation does; (4) an optimal pathway for establishing employee loyalty is identified as co-production → employee engagement → employee loyalty, while customer loyalty is primarily shaped through the pathway co-production → customer value creation → customer loyalty; (5) co-production intensity exerts moderating effects; and (6) employee seniority may function as a boundary condition in the relationship between employee loyalty and customer loyalty. Contributions: First, it is among the few studies to use paired data to examine value co-creation processes in service encounters. Second, it highlights the critical role of employee engagement in fostering employee loyalty. Third, it extends the co-production model (Auh et al., 2007) by identifying employee engagement as a mediating mechanism. Finally, it validates the applicability of the encounter process model (Payne et al., 2008), particularly in professional service contexts. Clinical trial number: Not applicable (this study does not involve human experiment).
Corporate community engagement refers to a strategy employed by companies to enhance community well-being through philanthropic initiatives. Rather than delving into the motivations behind such commitments, whether altruistic or purely commercial, this study examines the influence of consumers’ attitude toward community engagement on corporate reputation. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, combining qualitative data from depth interviews with quantitative analysis using a survey. This approach allows us to propose a scale for measuring attitude toward the company’s community engagement and to test a conceptual model. The findings indicate that cause evaluation positively and significantly affects consumers’ attitude toward community engagement, which, in turn, significantly enhances corporate reputation. Furthermore, the results reveal a moderating effect of place solidarity in the link between cause evaluation and attitude toward the company’s community engagement.
This study examines the effects of green social capital (green SC) and green dynamic capabilities (green DC) on corporate reputation in high-impact industries and the moderating role of customers’ tacit environmental expectations (CT) as a critical boundary condition. This study aims to provide a deeper understanding of how internal relational resources are transformed into reputational outcomes under conditions of environmental uncertainty and implicit customer demand. Survey data were collected from 398 firms in environmentally sensitive industries. The hypothesized relationships were tested using regression-based moderation analysis with the PROCESS Macro in SPSS. The results show that green SC has a positive and significant effect on green DC, which improves corporate reputation. Notably, CT strengthens the relationships between green SC and green DC and between green DC and corporate reputation. This study underscores that corporate reputation reflects observable sustainability practices and firms’ capacity to interpret and respond to stakeholder concerns. For managers and policymakers in high-impact industries, the findings underscore the importance of fostering internal social relationships and dynamic capabilities to navigate environmental complexities and build resilient corporate reputation.
This study investigates the influence of CEO ethical orientation (CEO_O) on the development of a whistleblowing culture (WB_CULT) within organizations, offering new empirical insights into how ethical leadership shapes transparency and internal accountability systems. Drawing on a longitudinal dataset of 1026 publicly listed firms across 10 European countries from 2015 to 2022, the study constructs novel composite indices for both CEO_O and WB_CULT. Employing a fixed effects panel regression and multiple robustness checks, including outlier exclusion, firm size segmentation, and endogeneity sensitivity tests, the analysis identifies a strong and statistically significant association between CEO ethical orientation and the strength of whistleblowing culture. The findings underscore the reputational and institutional importance of ethical orientation in fostering a culture of openness, trust, and responsible governance. Theoretically, the study extends the moral intensity framework and reputation theory by demonstrating how the perceived moral gravity of a CEO’s decisions translates into formalized ethical practices. Practically, the results highlight the strategic value of ethical leadership for boards, regulators, and investors seeking to strengthen organizational integrity. This research contributes to the growing discourse on sustainable corporate governance by positioning whistleblowing culture as a critical outcome of executive ethical behavior.
In this paper, we identify the factors that differentiate the elite U.S. business schools (Top 20) from their lower-ranked peers. We show that the elite schools rarely change rank, whereas those positioned 40 to 100 exhibit greater ranking volatility. Using data on research productivity and dean characteristics, we identify two distinguishing features. First, we show that research rankings of finance departments exhibit a strong positive correlation with elite business school rankings. Second, we find that the top business schools are more likely to appoint insider deans with academic backgrounds in Accounting, Economics, or Finance. These institutions also exhibit greater leadership continuity and are predominantly private universities. The research rankings and leadership characteristics help explain the stickiness of the Top 20. Current Draft: July 22, 2025.
This article examines how organizations respond to reputational scandals in sponsorship relationships within the fields of art and sport. While sponsorship has been widely explored as a means of building legitimacy, less attention has been given to how legitimacy is actively renegotiated when reputational crises occur. Drawing on stakeholder theory and institutional logics, we investigate how organizations justify either continuing or severing controversial sponsorship ties through strategies grounded in compliance or conformity. Using a comparative case study design and secondary data, we analyse four high-profile scandals involving either discredited sponsors or tainted recipients. The findings reveal that responses are shaped by field-specific reputational dynamics rather than by a simple binary logic. In symbolically rich domains such as the arts, organizations tend to invoke conformity-based arguments aligned with moral and cultural expectations; in performance-driven or lower-visibility sports, compliance-based justifications linked to legality and contractual obligations dominate. Hybrid responses also emerge, influenced by elite stakeholder pressure, media attention, and internal governance considerations. By linking symbolic capital, field structures, and stakeholder salience to sponsorship decision-making, this study contributes to research on corporate reputation, organizational legitimacy, and sponsorship ethics, offering insights for managers facing reputational threats in complex institutional environments.
Corporate websites play a critical role in digital recruitment, influencing job seekers’ perceptions and intentions to apply. This study examines how website aesthetics—Classic Aesthetics (CA) and Expressive Aesthetics (EA)—interact with corporate reputation to shape applicants’ intention to apply (ITA). Using a two-wave survey with 435 participants, we explore the mediating role of organizational attractiveness and the moderating effect of Corporate Reputation (CR). The results indicate that both CA and EA influence ITA through organizational attractiveness, but the moderating effect of CR is significant only in the indirect relationship between EA and ITA: when the CR is low the effect of EA is higher.These findings underscore the meaningful influence of website aesthetics on applicants’ initial perceptions, illustrating how different design elements shape both their views of the recruitment medium and the organization.
Firms increasingly rely on entertainment value to communicate Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), yet audiences often question sincerity and credibility. This study examines whether two orthogonal entertainment-value manipulations in CSR messages, hedonic entertainment and eudaimonic entertainment, positively predict moral elevation, and whether moral elevation is associated with CSR beliefs and downstream reputation-relevant outcomes under different levels of perceived argument specificity. Drawing on entertainment theory, moral elevation, and dual-process perspectives, we analyze data from a 2 (hedonic entertainment cues: absent vs. present) × 2 (eudaimonic entertainment cues: absent vs. present) between-subjects experiment (N = 384). Results showed that both hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment cues positively predicted moral elevation. Higher moral elevation was associated with stronger CSR beliefs, which, in turn, were associated with more favorable attitude toward the firm and greater support allocation to the CSR initiative. These associations were weaker when perceived argument specificity was higher. The study contributes by extending entertainment theory to CSR communication, identifying moral elevation as a key explanatory mechanism linking entertainment-based CSR messages to reputation-relevant outcomes, and positioning perceived argument specificity as an important boundary condition.
There is a limited understanding of how information about a negative event is used by customers when deciding whether to continue to trust a company (a key aspect of reputation management) and how the same information can result in different choices by individuals. To meet this gap, the aim here is to test the predictions from categorisation theory and assimilation contrast theory and to add to our theoretical understanding of trust loss. A moderation model of survey data (n = 410), a cluster analysis and a content analysis of explanations given are used to test hypotheses. The work demonstrates that a reaction to a potential trust violation involves two stages: a decision on responsibility, followed by an evaluation of the significance of the misconduct. If a trusted supplier is not held responsible, the typical customer will not re-categorise the supplier as not trusted. If they are held responsible, the typical customer may re-categorise the supplier as not trusted depending on how significant they believe the misconduct to be.
A broad thematic review of Social Marketing is analysed where 1566 scientific papers (191 keywords and 20455 citations) were extracted from the Web of Science from 1971 to 2020. Three main periods are identified (1971–2004, 2005–2013, and 2014–2020) where the research focus changes. Recently, health has remained a major area of interest, associated with a substantial amount of research on behaviour (the primary focus of the research domain). Other prominent fields are related to adolescents, emotions and children, among others. This paper responds to the need to analyse, for an extended period, the development of this field of research.
As public relations efforts increasingly integrate AI into operations, examining how the disclosure of AI as the source in organizational crisis communications affects public perceptions is increasingly relevant. This research investigates the effects of AI disclosure across matched crisis responses within a 3 (match crisis response: victim crisis-scapegoating, accidental crisis-excuse, preventable crisis-apology) x 2 (source disclosure: AI vs. human) experimental design survey. Key findings reveal that crisis responses with human sources, compared to those with AI disclosure, led to greater perceptions of organizational reputation and credibility across the three matched crisis responses. AI-disclosed messages from the company were also associated with increased perceptions of injustice, potentially due to concerns over fairness and authenticity. No significant interaction was detected between crisis response type and source disclosure, suggesting that they have independent effects on stakeholder perceptions. Trust in AI showed a small but statistically significant interaction with source disclosure within AI conditions for reputation, where higher trust slightly reduced the negative effects of AI disclosure. Practically, these findings suggest PR professionals should prioritize crisis communication with human sources while considering ongoing perceptions of trust in AI.
This study investigates how corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance, measured through environmental and social (E and S) dimensions, affects firm financial performance, and how this relationship is moderated by economic uncertainty. While prior studies have explored CSR–performance links, little attention has been given to cross-country differences under varying levels of economic stability. Using 8,062 firm-year observations from 894 firms across 15 countries (2002–2021), the results show that stronger CSR engagement enhances firm profitability measured by returns on assets and returns on equity, with the effect concentrated in developed economies. Importantly, higher economic uncertainty weakens the CSR–performance relationship. Robustness checks using alternative specifications and a GMM approach confirm these findings. By disentangling environmental and social dimensions and integrating economic uncertainty into the analysis, this paper contributes novel evidence to the international CSR literature and provides insights for managers and policymakers seeking to balance sustainability with resilience in uncertain contexts.
This review examines Grant and Nilsson’s “Intuitive Expertise and Financial Decision-Making,” which challenges the predominant focus on analytical tools in financial decision-making by highlighting the critical role of intuitive expertise. Drawing on dual-process theories, neuroscience, and empirical research with senior executives, the authors develop a framework explaining how domain-specific expertise intersects with intuition to facilitate effective judgments, particularly in ambiguous, high-stakes financial decisions. The book reveals that successful executives employ a parallel-competitive cognitive approach where intuitive and analytical processes work interactively rather than sequentially. Particularly illuminating is the finding that intuitive judgments about people—especially those who will shape future outcomes—often prove more decisive than quantitative analysis. The work significantly advances behavioral finance by demonstrating that intuition, when grounded in expertise developed through deliberate practice and learning from mistakes, can be a valuable cognitive asset rather than a liability, providing important implications for both researchers and practitioners in financial decision-making contexts.
The increasing contingencies facing firms in the 21st century have led some senior managers to intensify workforce pressure in efforts to maintain competitiveness and expand market share within their industry. However, this approach may inadvertently prompt employees to engage in duplicity to meet organizational objectives. Drawing from organizational behavior and sociology literature, this study introduces the construct of Organizational Induced Duplicity (OID) to capture how organizational practices and internal policies may be perceived by employees as endorsing dishonesty and duplicity in the workplace. Drawing on an initial pool of 63 items derived from a comprehensive literature review and focus groups, and guided by DeVellis’ (2016) framework for scale development, we conducted both exploratory (n = 114) and confirmatory (n = 191) factor analyses using responses from vendors in the Canadian telecommunications sector, ultimately establishing a 12-item unidimensional scale. Beginning with 63 items generated from a comprehensive literature review and focus groups, we conducted exploratory (n = 114) and confirmatory (n = 191) factor analyses to establish a 12-item unifactorial scale. To further validate the scale, we assessed its criterion validity via a series of two-steps regression analyses. OID positively correlates with employee turnover intentions and negatively with job satisfaction and work engagement. This study offers a robust tool for measuring OID, contributing to a further understanding of how organizational policies may influence employee behavior.
This research highlights qualities and capabilities of new age interactive technologies like chatbots to satisfy the needs of customers as per their expectations. To address the gap in literature about utilisation of chatbots to improve customer engagement that hinges on several critical aspects such as responsiveness, accuracy, and personalisation related issues faced by fashion brands, this study conceptualises how AI can be used to simultaneously use chatbots with human intelligence to satisfy customers. It also reflects on responsiveness as a feature that addresses enquiries of customers promptly and engages them without any gender or privacy bias and with transparency. Findings of this research propose that advanced natural language processing algorithms can understand and process complex user queries and contexts, but should be applied with ethical considerations. Additionally, the integration of emotional AI with HI in features of chatbots can help in recognising and responding to users.
Purpose This article investigates how a celebrity’s growing crisis history influences media framing and stakeholder perceptions over time. Using Kanye West as a case study, it introduces the concept of crisis history toxicity—the cumulative reputational damage that occurs when repeated crises alter the framing of both the individual and associated brands, even during co-creative events. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a longitudinal case study approach, analyzing 40 brand-relevant events from 2008 to 2023 through content analysis of 938 media articles across fashion, business, and popular outlets. Articles were coded for tone, crisis type, journalistic style, and associations with value co-creation or co-destruction. Quantitative methods, including correlation, regression, and ANOVA, were used to assess reputational patterns and media dynamics over time. Findings Results demonstrate a significant shift in media tone over time, with an increasingly negative portrayal of West—even during positive brand events—as his crisis history deepened. The media’s framing transitioned from reputational crises to transgressions, reflecting reduced public tolerance. Associated brands (e.g., Adidas, GAP) also experienced reputational damage by association, though to a lesser extent. A key tipping point occurred in 2022, when coverage moved decisively toward value co-destruction. Originality This study offers a novel contribution to reputation research by empirically conceptualizing crisis history toxicity and demonstrating its effects on media framing and stakeholder perceptions. It provides actionable insight for managing reputational risk and alliance strategies in highly visible, media-driven industries.
Corporate philanthropic behavior has witnessed an increase in recent years in China due to increase in public emergencies. We conducted a literature review of the relationship between corporate philanthropic behavior and public value feedback; subsequently, we analyzed the effects and mechanisms between corporate philanthropic donation behavior and immediate public value feedback using event study analysis methods and differential models. The results show that corporate charitable donation behavior has direct and immediate negative impacts in the short term during major unexpected public events. However, when corporate charitable giving behavior arouses positive public value perceptions, it generates positive immediate value returns. Specifically, the immediate positive returns to public value perceptions are more significant for state-owned firms compared to non-state-owned firms, and for central regions compared to non-central regions. In sum, these findings extend the economic and social motivation theories of corporate philanthropic behavior, enrich research on charitable giving, public value perception, and immediate returns to corporate value, and provide decision support.
Companies increasingly use corporate social responsibility to engage consumers and foster deeper connections. This study investigates how CSR initiatives influence consumers’ attraction to a company’s identity. Company identity attraction, defined as the consumer’s emotional and cognitive pull toward a company, based on perceived alignment with personal values and social identity. Despite growing interest in CSR, the mechanisms by which it shapes identity attraction and consumer–company identification remain underexplored. This study fills this gap by empirically testing the model which examines the mediating role of consumer–brand congruity and the moderating role of CSR awareness. Collecting data from 349 Pakistani consumers and analyzed by partial least square structural equation modeling. The results reveal that CSR has positive significant influence on identity attraction and consumer–company identification, with consumer awareness strengthening these effects. The findings contribute to theory by advancing our understanding of the role of CSR in identity-based consumer behavior and offer practical implications for firms seeking to cultivate loyalty through socially responsible branding strategies.
