The Impact of Individual and Organizational Reputation on Physicians’ Appointments Online

ABSTRACT

Insufficient research exists on the impact of reputation in online health-care market communities, especially from the multilevel and cross-level perspectives. Based on prior research on individual and organizational reputation, we hypothesize multilevel and cross-level reputation determinants of physicians’ performance in online health-care market communities. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we analyzed the data of 47,182 physicians from 660 hospitals in a Chinese online health-care market community to test our hypotheses. Our results suggest that the number of physicians’ appointments is positively associated with their individual offline and online reputations, as well as the offline and online reputation of the hospital in which the physicians work. We also find that organizational reputation moderates the relationship between an individual’s reputation and a physician’s performance, in such a way that the hospital’s offline reputation increases the importance of physicians’ online reputation in promoting the number of physicians’ appointments. However, the hospital’s online reputation enhances the relationship between physicians’ offline reputation and the number of appointments. Our study contributes to existing theories of reputation and the signaling theory, and also provides physicians with guidelines that support them in effectively improving their performance.

KEY WORDS AND PHRASES:

• Individual reputation
• online health-care market communities
• online professional reputation
• organizational reputation
• physician reputations

Acknowledgment

This study was partially funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 71531007, 71471048, 71471049, 71401046, and 71101037).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiaoxiao Liu

XIAOXIAO LIU ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. candidate in information systems at the Harbin Institute of Technology. He received his MS in management science and engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology. His research focuses on online health communities and price strategy in health care.

Xitong Guo

XITONG GUO ([email protected]; corresponding author) is a professor of information systems at the Harbin Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in information systems at the City University of Hong Kong and Ph.D. in management science and engineering at the University of Science and Technology of China. His research focuses on e-health, social computing, and information technology–enabled innovation. His work has been published in the Journal of Management Information Systems, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, and Electronic Markets, among others.

Hong Wu

HONG WU ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. candidate in information systems at the Harbin Institute of Technology. She received her MS in finance at the Harbin Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the impact of information systems on health care and online health communities.

Tianshi Wu

TIANSHI WU ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of information systems at the Harbin Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in information technology (IT) management at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on IT business value, e-health, and learning curves in service organizations, such as hospitals and customs. His work has been presented in many journals and conferences, including Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, the Production and Operations Management Society Annual Meeting, and the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics, among others.