The paper aims to investigate the linkage among prior financial performance, organizational reputation and earnings quality. Firstly, it examines the influence of prior financial performance on organizational reputation and on earnings quality. Secondly, this research explores the moderating role that prior financial performance plays in the causal relationship from organizational reputation to earnings quality. Thirdly, the mediating role of organizational reputation in the effect of prior financial performance on earnings quality is analyzed. The empirical findings show that, prior financial performance positively affects both earnings quality and organizational reputation that in turn partly mediates the causal connection from prior financial performance to earnings quality; whereas prior financial performance imposes a positive moderation in the influence of organizational reputation on earnings quality. This research is expected to provide scholars and practitioners with a thorough understanding of the complex link among prior financial performance, organizational reputation and earnings quality. That helps them to deliver good decisions on the investment of suitable resources in maintaining and enhancing their organizational reputation, which assures a higher quality of reported earnings that in turn improves involved stakeholders’ confidence in their firm. This likely leads the firms to gain better performance in the future.
The paper aims to investigate the relationship between firm size and organizational actions on adopting social media for corporate reputation management. The sample group of 198 companies is selected with a simple random sample method from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) listings: Sixty nine companies were from the Fortune 500 listings, seventy one companies from the NYSE midsize capitalization and fifty eight companies from the NYSE small capitalization listings. This study employs cross tabulations and Chi-square analysis, and the Kruskal-Wallis that enables the comparison of three samples that are independent. The results of the study show that (1) large firms have more social media ownership than small firms, (2) large firms respond to social media posts at a greater frequency and quickly than small firms, and (3) firm size is less likely associated with response styles to social media for online reputation management. The results show that reply time and response styles of organizations to social media customers in the 2015 survey has no significant change compared to that of 2011. There appears to be a pervasive lack strategic framework as most firms in the study were found not to be adequately monitoring or leveraging social media communication for their reputation management.