Changing organizational reputation in management consulting

Abstract

Despite a growth of work on building, managing and rehabilitating organizational reputation, we know relatively little about how organizations can effectively change their reputations. Through studying the case of a global management consulting firm, we show how firms with positive reputations can change their reputations despite resistance from different stakeholders. We find that particular organizational factors comprising of legitimated expertise, relevant celebrity and strong relationships as well as institutional conditions such as the knowledge of clients, competition environment and firm history can enable organizations to change their reputations. A significant contribution of this paper is to show how firms with established reputations can overcome the burden of reputation stickiness through satisfying certain organizational factors and institutional conditions.