What is an organization? A group of people who work together in an organized way for a shared
purpose
Models are simplified. A model is a caricature (simple and sometimes not serious), saves mental
labor, and is a framework for communication.
Sequential excellence model → summary of how organizations think and their challenges.
1. Sustainability
2. Innovation – Everyone has to be innovative
3. Positioning – how am I different, how will I achieve my goals
4. Culture and diversity – really important to understand other cultures
5. Customers – who is your task
6. HRM – everyone has to deal with staff
7. Benchmarking – make goals
8. (Middle) Leadership – direct or indirect, there is always leadership and communication
If organizations are not open about their communication strategy, they have something to hide –
openness and transparency is sign of strength and creates trusts
Why communication strategy?
• Be clear so we can make a good choice
• If an organisation is not clear about their strategy, you should not invest in it.
o The boardroom gets a lot of questions of several stakeholders
▪ Requested transparency
• Protection against abuse:
o Give info that: 1) is legally required, 2) improves reputation
o Do not give: sensitive stuff (nuclear codes, cola recipe, etc.)
• Effect on:
o 1. Awareness (recognition)
o 2. Attitude (interest/desire/engagement/ reputation/image/trust/legitimacy)
o 3. Action (positive/neutral/negative)
Stakeholder theory influences how organisations deal with the media.
Agency theory: the more organisations are open (or seem to be open), the better: 1) the liquidity of
stock improves, 2) their reputation.
How to communicate
Strategy is about where you want to go as an organisation:
• Strategic management: strategy (sources, messages) (who are we and where are we going as
an organisation?)
o Vision
o Mission/purpose
o Strategy
o Implementation
• Communication management: communication (channels, receivers) (which of my
vision/mission/etc. do we put in advertising?)
o From media: paid (ads), earned (public relations), social, owned
o to stakeholders
,Reputation
• ‘Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the
tree is the real thing.’
• Reputation = trust
What does it bring?
• Magnet for talent
o You want to work with an organization who has a good reputation
• Magnet for credit
• Buffer in crisis
What are the draw backs
• Subjective
• Hard to get (a good reputation)
• Easily lost
o One bad step and you lost your reputation
Identity & image: how can an organisation optimise the relationship between its identity and its
image?
• Image is three buttons
o Personality (Behavior, Symbolism, Communication)
Reputation management: interaction between corporate identity formation, reputation,
improvement and organisational performance.
Who controls media?
Who controls the conversation? Nobody.
• if you are a powerful organisation, you can have a fair share in influencing the conversation.
Stakeholders rely on media
“We found that stakeholders depend more on the news media to learn about reputation dimensions
that are difficult to directly experience or observe and for which the news media are the main source
of information.” (Einwiller, Korn & Carroll, 2010).
Influencers: corporate media, events, PR, investor relations, journalism, corporate marketing
communication, advertising, design, social media, public affairs.
• Different groups/factors in influencing the media.
What is communication?
SMCR-model: Source → Message → Channel → Receiver model
Article 1: Buffering negative news: individual-level effects of company visibility, tone, and pre-
existing attitudes on corporate reputation - Jonkman et al. (2019)
Corporate reputation: the way in which members of the public, or specific organisational
stakeholders, evaluate a firm. Also, in short: people’s opinion of a company.
Media reputation: the overall evaluation of a corporation presented in the media.
Research question: To what extent does the visibility of a corporate actor in the news negatively
affect the corporate reputation of this actor?
,H1: the more positive the tone of news about a company, the more positive the corporate reputation
of that company.
H2: the negative effect of negative news on corporate reputation is stronger than the positive effect
of positive news.
H3: Pre-existing reputation moderates the effect of tone on corporate reputation such that the more
positive the individual’s initial opinion of the corporation is, the weaker the negative effect of
negative news on reputation will be.
Method: three-wave online panel survey.
Findings:
H1: confirmed, but small effect sizes. Corporate visibility in the news thus can have a negative effect
on reputation.
H2: confirmed. Tone can thus have a positive effect on reputation.
H3: confirmed. A positive prior reputation lessens (and even dampens) the negative effect of
negative news. Prior reputation is thus a buffer for corporate reputation.
Article 2: Social media and the formation of organisational reputation - Etter et al. (2019)
Purpose of the article: discuss how social media - and the new forms of interaction that they enable
- challenge consolidated assumptions about media reputation, and offering a theoretical framework
that, while not denying the persisting influence of traditional news media and corporate
communication, begins to account for how social media are shifting the dynamics through which
publicly available evaluations are shaping collective reputational judgments.
Organisational reputation: the prominence of an organisation in the public’s mind and collective
perceptions about its “quality and performance characteristics” as well as its “goals, preferences, and
organisational values”.
In this paper, they argue:
• We can no longer take the relative alignment between the content of news media and
collective judgments for granted, as the relationship between media reputation and
organisational reputation may now be more fragmented, recursive and dynamic than
previously assumed.
• In contrast to past research, which saw no role for emotions in the formation of reputation,
we argue that positive and negative emotional responses play an important role in the
production and diffusion of evaluations on social media.
The formation of organisational reputation is based on the processing and interpretation of
information cues to form analytical evaluative judgement about, for instance, the quality or
trustworthiness of an organisation. Cues are created by:
• Themselves when they strategically project positive images of themselves through corporate
communication or symbolic action
• Direct exposure to the products, services, or more general actions of an organisation
• Other actors such as the news media
News media enjoy exclusive formal and informal access to elite sources and act as gatekeepers by
filtering information that they consider newsworthy and disseminating it to the general public. In this
respect, the extant literature assumes a structural distinction between a privileged source of
evaluations (the news media) and an audience who receives and processes them (the public).
, Social media now give voice to actors who previously had limited access to the public domain, and it
enables them to bypass the gatekeeping function of traditional news media and reach wide
audiences connected through online social networks.
Journalists tend to have:
• Smilar selection criteria
• Access to and use a similar set of sources for their stories
• The same impersonal and unemotional style, using a vocabulary and tone that reflects a
“journalistic genre”
• Their news content tends to converge over time through cross-referencing and confirmation
from similar others
So, news media are treated as a relatively monolithic entity.
Research suggests that news media may be reluctant to disseminate negative evaluations of
organisations for fear of losing preferential access to information, concerns of legal actions, and
economic dependence on them. They regard senior managers' communications as particularly
useful, and they may refrain from publishing content that may endanger privileged relationships with
management. Publishers and editors-in-chiefs may also be reluctant to publicise content that may
trigger 1) legal action or 2) cause the loss of advertising revenue.
Conclusion:
Social media and digital technologies are changing how information about organisations is produced
and disseminated in the public domain, even by traditional news media.
Article 3: Voluntary disclosure of corporate strategy: determinants and outcomes - an empirical
study into the risks and payoffs of communicating corporate strategy - Coebergh (2011)
Purpose of the article: to develop understanding and provide empirical evidence that helps leaders
of publicly listed companies understand how voluntary disclosure of corporate strategy contributes
to corporate success.
Research questions:
1. What are determinants of voluntary disclosure of corporate strategy?
2. What are the outcomes of voluntary disclosure of corporate strategy?
Four major changes in organisational life that trigger new ways of communication:
1. Managers have a larger span of control than ever before, whilst the job of supervision is
getting more complicated and time consuming, leading to a wider participation in decision
making.
2. A shift from authority-based leadership towards guidance based on coaching.
3. The use of computerised information technology
4. Today, an organisation’s competition is no longer regional or national, but global. To be
responsive to global pressures, organisations must legitimately empower their core
employees.
The sphere of influence of the organisation thus becomes a dynamic space as new transactions
develop and change with new partners. In the end, the key to this emerging organisational concept is
managing the “transactivity” of the organisation.
Metaphor of the seemingly inevitable necessity for corporations to become more transparent than
ever: “the naked corporation”.
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