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The purpose of this paper is to conceptually develop and empirically test a model according to which a crisis leads to a greater reputational damage when it is highly relevant to the firm’s organizational identity or highly relevant to stakeholders’ identity.

A total of 299 participants based in the USA were recruited online using the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. The study uses a 2 (relevance of crisis to organizational identity: low vs high) × 2 (relevance of crisis to stakeholders’ identity: low vs high) between-subjects experimental design.

The results confirm the hypotheses that an organizational crisis leads to greater reputational damage when it is highly relevant to the firm’s organizational identity or when it is highly relevant to stakeholders’ identity. No significant interaction between the two variables was found.

Future research could focus on further elaborating on how the two identity-related variables tested in this paper interact with other variables that have already been studied for moderating the effects of crises on reputation damage.

The paper reaffirms the deep interconnection between identity, stakeholders and reputation. Concretely, the results of the study suggest an informative way of mapping the degree to which risks or issues could potentially damage organizational reputation.

The paper contributes to the literature by providing a more situational understanding of how the same exact crisis can damage the reputation of organizations differently. By doing so, the paper opens several new avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a method that the authors call stakeholder cross-impact analysis (SCIA), which is aimed at analyzing how a given set of stakeholders influence one another and also how such stakeholders relate to a given set of issues.

The authors first identify, in the current literature, a lack of analytical tools for assessing mutual influences among stakeholders. The authors then identify cross-impact analysis, a method that was initially developed in the field of futures research, as a suitable method to be applied in the present research. Its application, which the authors call SCIA, is described in detail through a fictitious case.

SCIA permits to assess the direction and the strength of relationships between stakeholders. Furthermore, it allows for the classification of stakeholders based on their level of dependence and influence on others. Also, it is possible to integrate SCIA with social network analysis in order to understand the degree to which stakeholders agree on how issues influence one another, as well as to identify which issues most stakeholders consider to be central and which stakeholders have the most shared opinion on how issues are related.

This method can be used, along with traditional segmentation techniques, by corporate communication and public relations practitioners in order to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of organizations’ environments.

SCIA represents a much-needed and novel way of understanding the complexity of organizations’ environments.