How Best to Communicate Intangible Resources on Websites to Inform Corporate-Growth Reputation of Small Entrepreneurial Businesses

Identifying disclosure communication signals as narrative, visual, and numerical, and measuring them using two methods, this study investigates how best the intangible resources can be used to communicate future-period corporate-growth reputation, measured as future sales growth, of the fastest growing small companies in Australia over a continuous three-year period. Using insights from resource-based theory and signaling theories, and generating data using content analysis from 276 companies, this study finds that communication signals when combined rather than in isolation are predictors of future-period corporate-growth reputation. The study provides additional support for current-period corporate-growth reputation mediating intangible resource signals in predicting future-period corporate-growth reputation.