https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026619858878 Organization & Environment 2020, Vol. 33(3) 464–482 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1086026619858878 journals.sagepub.com/home/oae Article The Halo Effect and Social Evaluation: How Organizational Status Shapes Audience Perceptions on Corporate Environmental Reputation Sangchan Park 1 , Daegyu Yang 2 , Hyeonjin Cha 3 , and Seobin Pyeon 4 Abstract Although firms generally strive to enhance social evaluations, scholars have noted that such evaluations may not completely reflect actual performance of the firms. Extending this approach to the domain of environmental sustainability, we focus on the importance of social evaluation heuristics and explore how a firm’s status, or generalized evaluation not directly linked to environmental performance, plays a key role in shaping audience perceptions on its environmental reputation. Using multiple sources of data on 178 global companies’ green reputation, status, and environmental performance, our study shows that a firm’s status significantly enhances its environmental reputation assessed by general consumers and that the status effect varies significantly according to media frames. These findings illuminate the richness and complexity in the relations between status, reputation, and media-provided information in the area of environmental sustainability. Keywords social evaluations, status, reputation, media-provided information, halo effect Introduction Scholars have highlighted that firms generally strive to enhance perceptual evaluations, such as good reputations (Crilly, Zollo, & Hansen, 2012; Kim & Lyon, 2014; Marquis, Glynn, & Davis, 2007; McDonnell & King, 2013). This general tendency of firm behavior toward high social evaluations has also been widely noted in an array of domains in which the idea of environmental sustainability has gained public popularity (Bansal & Hoffman, 2012; Berthelot, Cormier, & 1 KAIST College of Business, Seoul, Korea 2 Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea 3 Korea Small Business Institute, Seoul, Korea 4 Enel X, Seoul, Korea Corresponding Author: Sangchan Park, KAIST College of Business, 85 Hoegi-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 02455, Korea. Email: parks@kaist.ac.kr 858878OAE XX X 10.1177/1086026619858878Organization & EnvironmentPark et al. research-article 2019