Abbie Oliver, an assistant professor in the Managerial Sciences Department, has been awarded the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation Best Dissertation Award for 2018 for her
dissertation, “Think Crisis, Think Female?: Stakeholder Reactions to CEOs Following Corporate Violations.”
Her dissertation addresses a very topical and interesting topic: How do external stakeholders react to female leadership, and how do female leaders manage a firm’s reputation following a corporate violation. Rooted in gender role theory, Abbie’s work suggests that firms with female CEOs signal what stakeholders want during a crisis—an empathetic, open, and apologetic leader—resulting in less negative stakeholder reactions than firms with male CEOs. The theory that Abbie develops will hopefully make a strong impact on reputation research and extend our understanding of the realities female executives face.
The Centre for Corporate Reputation is an independent research center within Oxford University’s Saïd Business School that aims to understand how the reputations of organizations are created, sustained, enhanced, destroyed and rehabilitated. The award recognizes the significant scholarly contribution made by your dissertation to the subject of reputation. It comes with a £1,000 prize, which was presented to Abbie during the Centre’s annual Symposium dinner in Exeter College.
Broadly, Abbie’s research explores the microfoundations of strategic management. Specifically, she is interested in stakeholder management, corporate governance, and social evaluations. She focuses on the socio-cognitive mechanisms that shape strategic decision making and external perceptions of firms,and is most interested in how diversity influences these relationships in the upper echelons. Her work fits within a nexus of strategic management, organization theory, and social psychology.