Morality rules: Understanding the role of prior reputation in consequences of scansis

Abstract

A favorable reputation casts positive influences over organizations’ short- and long-term development, which can be especially important when organizations grapple with unpredictable challenges such as organizational crises. Yet, keeping a good track record might also backfire to cause more reputational damages, which is often observed when organizations deal with value-oriented moral crises. Against this backdrop, drawing from the literature on crisis communication and moral psychology, we situated our study in the scansis context, a particular type of morality-focused negative situation featuring characteristics of both crisis and scandal, and explored effects of prior reputation on people’s responses to an organizational scansis. Through an online experiment (N = 293), we found severe backlash towards the scansis-stricken organization in both the control condition (i.e., no indication of reputation) and the good reputation condition, whereas such prominent difference was not observed in the bad reputation condition. The findings thus implicated the need to take the unique role of morality in scansis into account in both pertinent research and practice.