Simone Mariconda - room A34 - 13:30-15:00

Ambivalence and reputation judgments: An experimental investigation on the effects of new(s) information

Researchers in organizational reputation have mostly focused on understanding the antecedents and consequences of positive reputations (Deephouse, 2000, Rindova et al., 2005) and, to a lesser extent, negative ones (Dollinger et al., 1997). However, in many cases, people do not only evaluate organizations in a positive or negative way, but rather in both ways contemporarily - that is, they are ambivalent (Brooks et al., 2003). In spite of the prevalence of ambivalence in all kinds of relationships (Pratt and Doucet, 2000), little attention has been paid to better understanding the consequences of this phenomenon in relation to reputation judgments.

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between ambivalence and corporate reputation by conceptually and empirically clarifying how the degree of underlying ambivalence towards a certain organization influences the stability of people reputation judgments when new(s) information is provided and how this information, in turn, influences people ambivalence.

We start the paper by expanding the discussion of the concept of ambivalence. After this, by relaying on existing research in social psychology on ambivalence, we put forward the three hypotheses of the study. We then describe the design of the study that we use to test our hypotheses and present results. Results suggest that subjects with higher levels of ambivalence towards an organization react differently to new information regarding that same organization, compared to people with lower ambivalence. At the same time, results also show that ambivalence scores change significantly after being exposed to new information, suggesting that, when possible, people use new information to diminish their sense of ambivalence. Taken together, the preliminary results deriving from one study, suggest an interesting relationship between ambivalence, new information and reputation judgments worth investigating further. We conclude by discussing the main implications and contributions of our study.