The value of a corporate, workplace & social reputation to potential executive employees

![CDATA[Over the last several years we have seen a rising public consciousness of the importance of an organization’s reputation. This is evidenced in the heightened media reporting of corporate crimes, dodgy decision making, and excessive executive compensation that have been unearthed from the global financial crisis. Consultants, managers, and social commentators believe more than ever that reputations are important – to the organizations that create them, the people who use them to evaluate whether or not to trust an organization, and to potential employees being sought in the “war for talent”. There is also a growing body of scholarly literature supporting the belief that a better reputation than one’s peers is commercially valuable. Applying the logic of the resource-based view of strategy some scholars argue that a better reputation is a firm-specific strategic asset. However, for these claims to hold and be material for firms seeking to build a reputation there has to be some ‘line-of-sight’ between the actions that create the reputational signal and the performance outcomes of the firm. In other words, there needs to be either cost based (e.g., operationally better and more secure supply chains) or demand based (e.g., customers and employees who seek out firms with better reputations or pay more for their products and managers who know how to capture these rents) instruments that managers can manage. The aim of this paper is to focus on the demand side of the reputation market and to examine reputation as a multidimensional construct that has both a utilitarian value and a signal value. To do this we test the extent to which potential employees - in this case, potential managers and executives coming from graduate business schools - value a good reputation.]]