THE INTERACTION BETWEEN ENTREPRENEURIAL CORPORATION AND CORPORATE REPUTATION: AN EMPIRICAL LONGITUDINAL STUDY

This study shows that corporate innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking highly interact with corporate reputation. We show that a corporation's reputation is a volatile good. Based on longitudinal data of 68 corporations, we illustrate that there are reputation winners, reputation losers, and those corporations with a continual bad reputation. Even more important, this study shows that proactiveness and risk-taking as two prominent dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation increase the likelihood of gaining reputation. In turn, increased reputation is rewarded with subsequent higher innovativeness. Therefore, we show that the sub-dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation should be considered separately and illustrate different effects of these sub-dimensions concerning corporate reputation. As a result, we contribute to the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and corporate reputation by employing a large-scale longitudinal data set covering a period of eight years. Entrepreneurship researchers and practitioners are enabled to elaborate the consequences of their management approach in much more detail.