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This paper aims to explore the key elements and dynamic formation mechanisms involved in the company identity construction during multicompany identification.

This study adopted a longitudinal single case study method, selected a representative company as the study case and analyzed the interactive practice of identity construction between the company and its external stakeholders based on the theory of organizational identity and sensemaking.

This study finds that the process of company identity construction for external stakeholders involves six elements. Companies mainly use a highly controlled, equality and interaction model to develop identity for a single stakeholder. Company identity is based on the company’s core identity claims and is formed by gradually integrating and cooperating with the identity claims of different stakeholders. Meeting the self-defining needs of stakeholders is a key driving force behind the evolution of company identity.

This study offers practical implications for companies to pursue and construct multicompany identity. For different types of external stakeholders, companies can adopt different identity sensemaking models. To build a new company identity, a company needs to do more on the basis of identity insights to break cognitive constraints and build new identity claim. Companies need to integrate new identity claims with the original identity claims. If different identity claims conflict or are difficult to reconcile, it may damage their original identity claims and companies need to evaluate the trade-offs.

This study expands the concept of company identity construction from the individual perspective to organizational identity and contributes to research in relationship marketing. This study identifies the key elements of company identity construction with multistakeholder participation and contributes to theory building in company identity research. The results of this study reveal the company identity construction mechanism for different external stakeholders and the dynamic formation process of multicompany identity.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between company identity information disclosure, trust, and consumer self‐disclosure intentions during the first visit to a company website.

This study conducts one‐factor (company identity information disclosure) between‐subject experiment design. Participants were randomly assigned into two groups: company identity information disclosure – high vs low. Furthermore, this study also uses LISREL to analyse the model.

The analytical results indicate that when a company website discloses much of its identity information, consumers trust the company more, and exhibit greater intentions to provide their personal information. Specifically, this study's results show that consumer's trust mediates the relationship between company identity information disclosure and consumer self‐disclosure intentions.

Companies often invite consumers to disclose personal information on websites, and then use this information to build and maintain relationships with these customers. This study suggests that a company can disclose their information more on their website. Consequently, consumers trust more toward the company and then have higher disclosure intentions.

Traditionally, most interpersonal communication research indicates when someone discloses more, the other communication participant also discloses more. Although previous research investigates the impact of online information disclosure on trust and consumer self‐disclosure, there are no studies that address the potential impact of a company disclosing information about its identity. This study examines the influence of company identity information disclosure and emphasises the important role of trust during the first visit to a website.

Entrepreneurial ventures aspiring to disrupt existing market incumbents often use business-model innovation to increase the attractiveness of their offerings. A value proposition is the central element of a business model, and is critical for this purpose. However, how entrepreneurial ventures modify their value propositions to increase the attractiveness of their comparatively inferior offerings is not well understood. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the value proposition innovation (VPI) of aspiring disruptors.

The authors used a flexible pattern matching approach to ground the inductive findings in extant theory. The authors conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with managers from startups in the global electric vehicle industry.

The authors developed a framework, showing two factors, determinants and tactics, that play a key role in VPI connected by a continuous feedback loop. Directed by the determinants of cognitive antecedents, development drivers and realization capabilities, aspiring disruptors determine the scope, focus and priorities of various configuration and support tactics to enable and secure the success of their value proposition.

The authors contribute to theory by showing how cognitive antecedents, development drivers and capabilities determine VPI tactics to disrupt existing market incumbents, furthering the understanding of configuration tactics. The results have important implications for disruptive innovation theory, and entrepreneurship research and practice, as they offer an explanatory framework to analyze strategies of aspiring disruptors who increase the attractiveness of sustainable technologies, thereby accelerating their diffusion.

This paper aims to investigate the informativeness of rhetorical impression management patterns of CEO letters and examines whether these rhetorical features affect financial analysts’ forecasting behaviour.

The authors use textual analysis on a sample of 526 CEO letters of US firms and apply factor analysis on individual linguistic style measures to identify co-occurrence patterns of style features.

The authors identify three holistic style patterns (assertive acclaiming, cautious plausibility-based framing and logic-based rationalizing) and find that assertive rhetorical feature in CEO letters is negatively related with the dispersion of financial analysts’ earnings forecasts and positively associated with earnings forecast accuracy. CEOs’ use of a rationalizing rhetorical pattern tends to decrease the dispersion of financial analysts’ earnings, whereas a cautious plausibility-based rhetorical position is only marginally instrumental in getting more accurate earnings predictions.

Whilst impression management communication is often theorized as manipulative and void of real information content, the findings suggest that impression management serves both self-presentation and information-sharing purposes.

This paper elaborates on the co-occurrence of style characteristics in management communication and is a first attempt to validate the external ramifications of holistic style profiles of corporate narratives by focusing on an economic target audience.

This study unpacks how organizational members construct a collective entrepreneurial identity within an organization and attempt to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's existing identity.

The study draws on the cases of two venturing units, perceived as entrepreneurial groups within their respective parent companies. Semi-structured interviews and secondary data were collected and analyzed inductively and abductively.

The data revealed that organizational members co-constructed a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity to form a collective shared belief and communities of practice around what it meant to act as an entrepreneurial group within their local corporate context and how it differentiated them from others. Members also clustered around the emergent collective entrepreneurial identity through sensegiving efforts to instill entrepreneurial features in the organization's identity, despite the tensions this caused.

Previous studies in corporate entrepreneurship have theorized on the top-down dynamics instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity, but have neglected the role of bottom-up dynamics. This study reveals two bottom-up dynamics that involve organizational members' agentic role in co-constructing and clustering around a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study contributes to the middle-management literature, uncovering champions' identity work in constructing a “corporate entrepreneur” role identity, with implications for followers' engagement in constructing a collective entrepreneurial identity. This study also contributes to the organizational identity literature, showing how tensions around the entrepreneurial group's distinctiveness may hinder the process of instilling entrepreneurial features in an organization's identity.

This study aims to develop an original framework of green organizational identity to explore the positive effects of environmental organizational culture and environmental leadership on green competitive advantage through the partial mediator – green organizational identity.

This study proposes an original concept – green organizational identity – to develop an integral framework to enhance green competitive advantage. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is applied to verify the research framework.

The results showed that environmental organizational culture and environmental leadership are positively associated with green organizational identity and green competitive advantage. Green organizational identity had a partial mediation effect on the positive relationships between two antecedents – environmental organizational culture and environmental leadership – and green competitive advantage. Companies should enhance their environmental organizational culture and environmental leadership to raise their green organizational identity and further to increase their green competitive advantage. Furthermore, this study found that environmental organizational culture, environmental leadership, green organizational identity, and green competitive advantage of medium and small enterprises (SMEs) were all significantly less than those of large enterprises in the manufacturing industry in Taiwan.

It is imperative for SMEs to enhance their environmental organizational culture and environmental leadership to strengthen their green organizational identity and further to improve their green competitive advantage.

This study applies the theory of organizational identity to propose a novel concept – green organizational identity – and develops an integral conceptual model to explore its managerial implications, antecedents, and consequence.

The purpose of this paper is to address the research issue of how companies manage their consumers' identification to compete effectively in intensely competitive market places. Drawing on theories of social identity and organizational identification, this study proposes that favorable consumer purchase intentions often result from the consumer‐company identification (C‐C identification) which depends on several identity judgments like identity prestige and identity attractiveness.

A research model and 13 hypotheses are derived in this study. LISREL models are employed to identify the validity of the entire model and data are collected from ten direct selling companies.

The results of empirical analysis show that identity judgments positively affect C‐C identification and the degree of C‐C identification positively influences consumer purchase intentions. The moderating effects of identity trustworthiness and embeddedness have mild influences on the relationship between identification and purchase intentions.

This study confirms that encouraging identification has not only been identified as a good employee retention strategy in organization management but also a good customer retention strategy in marketing management.

This study intends to go one step further to empirically test the viability of the C‐C identification model that is lack of empirical supported.

This study aims to revisits the meaning of corporate identity (CI) in practice to identify its key dimensions and the interrelationships between them and to provide insights on how to operationalize the construct.

This study is based on a comprehensive literature review and qualitative research consisting of 22 semi-structured interviews with senior managers from 11 UK-leading companies, and three in-depth interviews with corporate brand consultants who worked closely with these firms in cognate areas.

The study identifies the following six key dimensions of CI in the UK industry: communication, visual identity, behavior, organizational culture, stakeholder management and founder value-based leadership.

The focus on UK leading companies limits the generalizability of the results. Further studies should be conducted in other sectors and country settings to examine the relationships identified in the current study.

This study identifies the salient dimensions of CI and, for the first time, the role of founder transformational leadership, employee identification and top management behavioral leadership as key dimensions and sub-dimensions of CI. The study also provides novel insights about the measurements for these dimensions. Additionally, this study introduces a model for the interrelationships between CI dimensions and their influence on corporate image, based on rigorous theoretical underpinnings, which lays the foundation for future empirical testing.