Seminar: Single Reputation or Multiple Reputations? The Case of a Global Management Consultancy Organisation

Speaker: Dr Will Harvey, University of Sydney Business School.

Summary
Although it is well-understood that corporate reputation is critical for the success of professional service organizations, our understanding of how reputation is judged and whether and in what ways organizations hold single or multiple reputations remains relatively poor.  This is important because internal and external stakeholders rely heavily on reputation as a gauge of quality within this sector.

Drawing on evidence from 117 interviews with multiple stakeholders of a global management consultancy organization, this paper finds that different stakeholders tend to hold different perceptions of an organization’s reputation, despite a common understanding of its core competencies.
Through analysing three forms of reputation (reputation for something, reputation with someone, and reputation in someplace), the paper brings into question the usefulness of single aggregate measures of reputation within professional service organizations.

This has significant impact on reputation contagion and therefore on how reputation should best be managed.