Playing politics or playing right: Impacts of reputation-seeking on short-term disruptions management

When disruptive events cripple a firm's operational capacity, the decision-making dynamics relating to recovery management become complex. In this study, we examine how the reputation-seeking behavior of managers involved in disruptions management impacts their recovery decisions. We explore this issue from both an analytical and an empirical perspective. Our results from our analytic models demonstrate how recovery decisions made by a reputation-seeking manager differ from those by an efficiency-seeking manager (i.e., a manager who uses a cost-optimizing decision calculus). To test our theoretical findings, we collected data from senior executives and managers to obtain 281 usable responses. Our empirical analysis corroborates our theory, and shows that reputation-seeking managers, relative to their peers who are efficiency-seeking, recover capacity at a higher level. Managers who have a greater propensity for reputation seeking give higher directives to, and participate less in teamwork with, their subordinates during recovery from disruptive events. We also find that the directives stipulated by reputation-seeking managers for their subordinates (i.e., the work demanded from the subordinates) depend on the effort level of subordinates. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings and highlight avenues for further research on the relationship between reputation-seeking behaviors and disruptions management.