Everyday there are revelations of organizations behaving in discreditable ways. Sometimes these actions result in damage to an organization's reputation, but often they do not. In this article, we examine the question of why external stakeholders may overlook disclosed discreditable actions, even those entailing ethical breaches. Drawing on stigmatization theory, we develop a model to explain the likelihood of reputational loss following revelations of discreditable actions. The model integrates four properties of actions (perceived control, perceived certainty, perceived threat, and perceived (...) deviance), stakeholder motivation, and media coverage. Implications for theory and for practitioners concerned with reputation management are discussed. (shrink)

Drawing on stakeholder theory and the concept of enlightened self-interest, we argue that firms that actively engage in corporate philanthropic giving also tend to demonstrate greater concern for investors’ interests by providing more transparent financial information and avoiding corporate misconduct. Moreover, the relationships between corporate giving, financial information transparency, and corporate misconduct vary significantly according to the firm’s ownership type, which affects the fundamental motivations for corporate philanthropy. In a sample of Chinese publicly listed firms from the 2003–2009 period, we (...) find a positive relationship between corporate giving and financial transparency, and note that the relationship is stronger for non-state-owned enterprises. We also find a significantly negative association between corporate giving and corporate misconduct for non-SOEs, but not for SOEs. Taken together, these findings suggest that responsibility to both stakeholders and shareholders is a vital part of building trust and reputations in China’s non-SOE sector. (shrink)

How do social audiences negotiate and handle stigmatized organizations? What role do their heterogenous values, norms and power play in this process? Addressing these questions is important from a business ethics perspective to improve our understanding of the ethical standards against which organizations are judged as well as the involved prosecutorial incentives. Moreover, it illuminates ethical concerns about when and how power imbalances may induce inequity in the burdens imposed by such social evaluations. We address these questions building on two (...) event-based case studies involving Hells Angels Motorcycle Club Norway, and contribute to organizational stigma theory in three ways. First, social evaluations of a stigmatized organization by multiple audiences are found to interact, collide and combine in a labelling contest. Second, we show that labels employed in this contest are pushed to either negative extremes or positive extremes. Finally, we show when and how power represents a double-edged sword in social evaluation processes, which can be wielded either to the benefit or to the detriment of the actors under evaluation. (shrink)

Taking credit is the process through which organizational members claim responsibility for work activities. We begin by describing a publically disputed case of credit taking and then draw on psychological, situational, and personality constructs to provide a model that may explain when and why organizational members are likely to take credit. We identify testable propositions about the credit-taking process, discuss ethical aspects of credit taking and suggest areas for research on credit taking in organizations.

Much research has examined the positive effects of legitimacy spillover. However, negative events may reduce the extent of legitimacy, which may in turn spillover to affect the legitimacy of important stakeholders including alliance partners. This study examines incidents of regulative legitimacy violation and focuses on the effect such incidents have on the alliance partners of the perpetrating organizations. We specifically examine three types of such violations—administrative law, criminal law, and civil law—to show that the loss of regulative legitimacy negatively influences (...) the stock market performance of alliance partners. More interestingly, not all corrective actions and repair efforts are equally impactful. We show that the effect of repair efforts by the perpetrating firm on the alliance partner differ depending on the nature of those violating incidents. (shrink)

We investigate the regulatory sanctions imposed on independent directors for their firms’ financial frauds in China. These regulatory sanctions are prima-facie evidence of significant lapses in business ethics. During the period 2003–2010, 302-person-time independent directors were penalized by the regulator, and the two stock exchanges. We find that the independent directors with accounting experiences are more likely to be penalized by the CSRC, though they do not suffer more severe penalties than do the other sanctioned independent directors. We also find (...) that independent directors suffer less severe penalties than do the insider directors. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the sanctions on independent directors are tied to their assumed ethical and legal responsibilities. Following a regulatory sanction, penalized independent directors experience a significant decline in the number of other board seats held. However, they can gain board seats in better quality firms. We find that interlocked firms that share penalized independent directors with the fraud firm do not suffer from a valuation decline. Overall, our results suggest that regulatory sanctions have not triggered further sanctions on the penalized directors in the labor market but they have, instead, created a disincentive for these directors to serve on the company boards of high-risk firms. (shrink)

What do events such as scandals, industrial accidents, activist threats, and mass shootings have in common? They can all trigger an audience’s stigma judgment about the organization involved in the event. Despite the prevalence of these stigma-triggering events, management research has provided little conceptual work to characterize the dimensions and processes of organizational event stigma. This article takes the perspective of the evaluating audience to unpack the stigma judgment process, identify critical dimensions for categorizing types of event stigma, and explore (...) the role of the stigmatizers’ aesthetic, emotional, and cognitive reactions as well as their practical considerations in producing what we call “sticky stigmas.” Our event stigma typology provides clarity regarding how stigmas differ based on the types of events and audiences’ reactions and why some event stigmas are stronger and more long-lasting than others. We highlight the role of emotions and aesthetics in stigma formation and the various ethical dilemmas that influence stigma stickiness. (shrink)

This article examines the proposition that a major cause of the major financial accounting scandals that received much publicity around the world was unethical leadership in the companies and compares the role of unethical leaders in a variety of scenarios. Through the use of computer simulation models, it shows how a combination of CEO's narcissism, financial incentive, shareholders' expectations and subordinate silence as well as CEO's dishonesty can do much to explain some of the findings highlighted in recent high profile (...) financial accounting scandals. Furthermore, it shows that the nature and impact of ethical leadership depends greatly on the institutional setting and can be expected to vary greatly by country and culture. In certain circumstances ethical leadership can have either a negligible or even opposite effect to that expected. (shrink)

Drawing from Goffman’s original observations on stigma and the consequences of interactions between the stigmatized and supportive or stigmatizing audiences, we conduct a 20-year review of the diverse literature on stigma to revisit the collective nature of stigmatization processes. We find that studies on stigma’s origins, responses, processes, and outcomes have diverged from Goffman’s relational view of stigma as they have overlooked important relational mechanisms explaining the processes of (de)stigmatization. We draw from those conclusions to justify the need to study (...) stigma as a collective phenomenon. We develop a relational perspective on stigma based on understanding how attributes are stigmatized (or not) by audiences in their interactions. We argue that to advance stigma research, it is necessary to build on Goffman’s theory to include the stigmatizers (i.e., the normal) and supporters (i.e., the wise); how they create, sustain, or remove stigma; and how they relate to the stigmatized (i.e., the targets). Accordingly, we provide a research agenda on stigma as a collective phenomenon that theorizes a relational perspective, proposes a typology of how audiences relate to stigmatization, and identifies patterns of relations between audiences. We thus offer a missing piece to existing accounts of stigma by focusing on the key role of audiences (i.e., stigmatizers or supporters of the stigmatized) rather than on the targets of stigma (i.e., the own). (shrink)