Managing stakeholders' perceptions in the oil industry though organizational identity expressions

Suggestions on how organizations should manage positive perceptions among stakeholders are scattered across a variety of disciplines such as perception management (Elsbach, 2003, 2006), reputation management (Fombrun & Van Riel, 2004; Rindova, Pollock, & Hayward, 2006), corporate branding (Brown & Dacin, 1997; Schultz, Antorini, & Csaba, 2005) and organizational legitimacy (Ashforth & Gibbs, 1990; Elsbach, 1994). Although these earlier works have looked at factors influencing positive perceptions among stakeholders from different perspectives, there is less specific insight in how organizations manage stakeholders’ perceptions by means of expressing their organizational identity. To fill this void, our study takes a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to develop a framework that identifies concrete characteristics of an organization’s identity expressions that may affect stakeholders’ perception of a company. The framework delineates how organizations orchestrate their organizational expressions according to four distinct characteristics: distinctiveness, consistency, transparency and sincerity. Drawing on literature on sensemaking and theories of information processing, we argue that the four identified expressiveness characteristics may play a central role in managers’ ability to ‘give sense’ of the organization’s identity (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Weick, 1995).