1. ¹Carroll School of Management, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA
2. ²Department of Management, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

Abstract

A change in an organization's reputation has consequences and implications that may go beyond that organization's boundaries. Drawing on social network and stakeholder research, we introduce the construct of reputation spillover to examine the process in which a reputational crisis occurred to one organization may spillover to other organizations that are either proximate or structurally equivalent to the focal organization. We argue that this process occurs mainly through the perceptions and reactions of stakeholders and is contingent upon the network centrality of the focal organization, the network structure of the industry and the past reputation of potential recipient organizations.