It’s Good for Our Reputation (?!) – the Impact of Socio-Political CEO Communication on Corporate Reputation

ABSTRACT

Chief executive officers (CEOs) are increasingly taking a public stance on controversial socio-political issues. This is partly because in polarizing societies, stakeholders increasingly expect corporations to fulfill a societal and moral responsibility beyond a mere economic scope. Although some publications acknowledge the trend of socio-political CEO communication, it remains largely unexplored. This research gap is especially prevalent regarding the impact on stakeholders’ assessments of corporate reputation. This article conceptualizes socio-political CEO communication as a form of corporate social advocacy (CSA) and theorizes that the direction of reputation effects depends on if and how strongly stakeholders agree with the CEO’s position. We conducted a fully standardized online experiment with a 3 (CEO’s expressed opinion) × 2 (topic of communication) between-subject design using a multidimensional operationalization of corporate reputation. Consistent with previous studies, we show that socio-political CEO communication has mainly negative effects. Although the effects apply to reputation dimensions under an expressive or social assessment logic, they do not become evident for dimensions that follow an economic-functional evaluation rationale.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Experimental
• Reputation
• Sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Buycotting is when consumers support a company by buying products/services. On the other hand, boycotting means that consumers actively avoid a company’s products/services. The reason for such behavior can be the socio-political positioning of a company in terms of CSA (Jungblut & Johnen, 2022).

² In the following, the term “social responsibility” is used for simplification purposes, as the fulfillment of ecological responsibility is always subject to social aspects.

³ The research design received formal approval from the Institutional Review Board of the authors’ university.

⁴ The full questionnaire and the stimulus material are available in the online appendix on OSF: https://osf.io/6xn8z/.