1. ¹Smeal College of Business, Management & Organization, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
2. ²Smeal College of Business, Management & Organization, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Abstract

We apply the concept of self-monitoring to organizations to outline an approach for better understanding how organizations can attend to the different ways in which stakeholders perceive organizational identity and various other organizational images. We argue that self-monitoring is a multilevel concept that can be applied not only to individual but also to the organizational level, and can contribute to an organization's ability to monitor the ways in which its many images are interpreted. We further suggest that organizations with high self-monitoring abilities have better capability for assessing how their identity is perceived, how these various interpretations might affect organizational identity and how these interpretations might be managed.