The Role of Values in the Creation and Maintenance of an Organization’s Reputation

Abstract

This chapter examines how leaders can utilize a clear values framework to signal what they want their organization’s reputation to be as well as design their organization to help ensure that what happens in the organization lives up to those espoused values. Reputations are, of course, built up among both internal and external audiences, and work must be done to ensure that neither audience develops negative impressions about the organization’s reputation.Key to this reputation development and management is consistency between espoused values and enacted values. While many organizations have espoused values, it can be difficult to embed them into the foundational practices of an organization; if they are not enacted, this can lead to direct reputational harm. Building them in fully means clearly enacting the espoused values with structures (the systems and rules), people (who is hired, supported, and excluded), and culture (the environment in which the organization operates). Values frameworks are therefore posited as the foundation upon which to build organizations which can lead to warding off potential reputational calamities in the first place, minimizing the impacts of reputational harms that do take place, and bouncing back more strongly in the wake of hits to an organization’s reputation.