Editorial: Virtual communication, organisational reputation and (mis)trust

Abstract

equipment and how they will be compensated. In addition to that, some new employees reported negative experiences such as labelling the process as terrible posting comments such as “ no one ready to help ” , “ halfthe team don ’ t even reply ” , “ It ’ s painful ” , “ Its miserable ” , “ The authorization process is very painful ” and “ It ’ s been really challenging onboarding remotely ” . Veronika Koller and Xiaoxi Wu write about analysts ’ identity negotiations and politeness behaviour in earning calls of US firms with extreme earnings changes to establish socially desirable identities in the Q&A of publicly accessible earnings calls. Findings show that analysts negotiate different identities according to specific social contexts where they promote their identities as competent professionals when they face problematic performance by asking questions in a confrontational manner with few politeness strategies and dependants of the firm by askingquestions in a more polite manner when firms experience satisfactory performance. With this, analysts also aim to present a socially desirable face in Q&A to influence managers ’ and investors ’ perceptions. Earning calls are hosted at the end of each quarter by firms, right after the release of quarterly financial results, and the audience includes financial analysts, investors, journalists and other stakeholders, with the primary goal of these calls being for managers to communicate company performance and future outlook to investors and analysts, thus making this form of communication highly sensitive and relevant for the business future. These two articles show the importance of virtual communication and the power of appropriate communication, thus opening the notion of interpersonal skills in virtual communication and how these skills influence communication outcomes. The issue of virtual socialisation and inducting new employees is indeed linked to organisational reputation as the analysis of the website with employee feedback has shown where employees have taken online to comment on poor onboarding experiences. As the second paper points out, politeness in virtual communication