The idea of organizational reputation is intuitive and simple in its common usage. However, it is surprisingly complex when employed and investigated in management research, as evidenced by the multiple definitions, conceptualizations, and operationalizations that have emerged across studies. The authors see the past decade as a formative phase of the research, characterized by attempts to bring theoretical coherence and rigor to the subject area. In their review of the management literature, the authors focus on this formative period in particular. They attempt to inspire and guide management researchers by clarifying what organizational reputation is. In particular, they identify three dominant conceptualizations, namely, that reputation consists of familiarity with the organization, beliefs about what to expect from the organization in the future, and impressions about the organization’s favorability. The final part of the review is an overview of recent empirical findings in the management literature pertaining to the effects or causes of organizational reputation. The authors conclude by drawing attention to some important directions for future research, including the needs to investigate organizational reputation as multidimensional and dynamic and to model its antecedents and effects as more complex than the unidirectional models typically proposed.

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The increasing importance of entrepreneurial behaviour has led scholars to embrace the idea that an entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is an important predictor of firm performance. While EO occupies a central position in strategic entrepreneurship research, scholars have yet to explore its origins in new ventures. Drawing on the knowledge-based and cognitive views, we theorize that a new venture team's transactive memory system is a cognitive mechanism that spurs the development of an EO. In a field study of high-tech new ventures in China, we examined the relationship between venture teams' transactive memory systems (representing the distribution, integration, and utilization of the teams' knowledge) and EO and the moderating influence of team-, firm-, and environment-level factors. We found that the transactive memory system of a new venture team enhanced their EO and that this relationship was positively influenced by intra-team trust, the structural organicity of a venture, and environmental dynamism. Our findings provide novel insights into the microfoundations of TMS in developing an EO in new ventures.

Women's interest and participation in entrepreneurship is growing. The limited and inconclusive findings on such growth have made it difficult to characterize its influence on new venture innovation performance. In addressing this issue, our study found a positive relationship between the gender diversity scores of new venture teams—reflecting the increased presence of women—and the innovation performance of new ventures. It also found the positive influence of gender diversity on (a) the relationship between the functional diversity of a venture team and its innovation performance and (b) the relationship between female employee presence and innovation performance.