Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
That’s a good question actually and I had three sort of different sources to that
Probably about ten to twelve years ago I was actually working on a paper
on how to audit the HRD function.
and one of the things that I was getting into was that
it had to be able to assess
corporate risks particularly risks that might come from a human resource development practices
so what that led to eventually was
one of the risks that organizations can face is from ineffective HRD practices.
They don't do training or they do training Badly,
and one of things can happen with that is that corporate reputation suffer. So
that was really the first time I got kind of interested in or aware
of dealing with organizational reputation issues.
The second was a couple years after that
I was actually doing a case study on a bully manager,
so as a person that was like a terror or a tyrant in the workplace.
Well, in going through the findings there, one of the things that came out was that
he had such a devastating effect on
managers that they would quit and the organization had a difficult time
recruiting or hiring managers to come and work for them because there was such a
he ended up having such a bad reputation
as an employer that nobody would work for him. They couldn’t even get head hunters
to find talent for them.
So again that sort of emphasizing brought back to my attention the importance of
reputation as an element there.
The third thing which was sort of the most immediate reason for getting
into this was I was interested in looking at SWOTS.
SWOTS stands for strengths weaknesses opportunities threats,
That’s sort of a classic organizational diagnostic technique.
I was wanting to take a look at it and Get little more idea about how it would be
involved and it will be applied.
So as I get into it I was I was thinking of in particular
relationship to the HRD program, which I run,
and so I wanted to, it became apparent that it was necessary to assess
organizational or this in this case program reputation.
So what that sort of led me to was to begin to take on a try to find are there
is there good guidance on how to do and measure organization reputation.
So that was sort of the immediate prompt that was kind of was fueled by these background
things sort of got me into it.
So that’s what was pushing me towards taking a look at organizational reputation.
It's fundamentally it's a literature review And what I was really trying to do was do a search
to find methods and procedures that can be used to do to measure organizational reputation.
So what I was trying to do was identify really the critical articles and the
critical theories, maybe some exemplary studies, how the research has been done,
to really do a thorough literature review of the field.
As I get into it though and it became pretty apparent that
there were a lot of issues with the approach.
And so what the article really turned into Be, more than just a literature
Review, became something of a broad range critique of
organizational reputation as a field of study as a methodological procedure,
and I did then come up with some recommendations or really kind of
guidelines about how to do reputation studies.
The main findings were several.
First, the first thing that becomes obvious the second you get into the literature
is that it's kind of a miss.
There's really no consensus as to what reputation means.
What I found was that there were a lot of different kind of approaches,
in fact I talk about five different sort of schools of reputation measurement and assessment.
There is looking at reputation as a set of beliefs,
as really the value to the judgments or attitudes.
There is looking at reputation as a Brand.
There’s looking at it as a personality, which is sort of interesting
coming out of psychology,
and then also is looking at reputation as a of financial measurement,
particularly in terms of goodwill.
Well, beyond these five different schools each of these schools has its own specific
techniques, and methods and procedures.
So, the main findings that comes out of that
is that this really if you're looking for
easy guidance about how to go out and measure organizational reputation you’re going to be
sorely disappointed.
So the other main thing is that there are again as I mentioned a lot of
different ways to do it,
and one of the problems is that a lot of times what will see in the press,
either the business press or otherwise, would be sort of surveys or descriptions of
organizational surveys.
One of the things is that these are common
of surveys of organizational reputation really are not assessments at all
of reputation. They really reflect expert judgments about companies
so they don't really reflect common reputation beliefs by an organization.
The other thing I think Was one of the big findings for me
was that in order to assess reputation you really need to be able to look at it
the beliefs that people have about the organization where they think about it
and also what are the value to the judgments sort of the attitudes of it.
So, to me assisting reputation means that you have to talk
to people are familiar with your organization some way or other.
and that they have formed some beliefs and attitudes about that particular organization.
Well what's next is I’m sort of actually back to where I started from and that is
trying to be able to assess and measure the reputation of this
program, the HRD program, that I’m running.
So where I’m at right now is I am
kind of back at that point but at least on the advantage now in that I have some
sort of procedural protocol
that I can now use and test. My intention is to as much as I can find
a population that will allow me to
go in and sort of test this method, test this procedure which I’ve developed,
and hopefully that's going to not only give me some information about the
reputation of the program, but also give me some ideas about
to what extent, this procedure will actually work, in terms of assessing organizational reputation.