I Love That Company: Look How Ethical, Prominent, and Efficacious It Is—A Triadic Organizational Reputation (TOR) Scale

James Agarwal (), Madelynn Stackhouse () and Oleksiy Osiyevskyy ()
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James Agarwal: University of Calgary
Madelynn Stackhouse: University of Calgary
Oleksiy Osiyevskyy: University of Calgary

Journal of Business Ethics, 2018, vol. 153, issue 3, No 18, 889-910

Abstract: Abstract Within the corporate social responsibility (CSR) research field, the construct of organizational reputation has been extensively scrutinized as a crucial mediator between the firm CSR engagement and valuable organizational outcomes. Yet, the existing literature on organizational reputation suffers from substantive divergence between the studies in terms of defining the construct’s domain, dimensional structure, and the methodological operationalization. The current study aims to refine the organizational reputation construct by reconciling varying theoretical perspectives within the construct’s definitional landscape, suggesting a holistic but parsimonious triadic view on the organizational reputation construct for customer stakeholders. Based on commonly used extant organizational reputation measures, we theoretically and empirically develop the customer-based triadic organizational reputation (TOR) scale and position it as a superordinate multidimensional construct (generalized favorability) influencing three distinct first-order dimensions: product and service efficacy, societal ethicality, and market prominence. Results show that the proposed triadic conceptualization of organizational reputation is theoretically defensible, and the resulting scale is cross-culturally generalizable and performs well compared with existing, longer measures of organizational reputation. Together, the organizational reputation model developed here suggests that, for cognitive economy and functional efficiency, customers will access a second-order reflective model of organizational reputation as the default implicit attitude (reputation as assessment), which in turn will activate reflections of the implicit attitude in the form of first-order dimensions (reputation as asset).

Keywords: Reputation; Ethics; Market prominence; Product and service; Scale development; Conceptualization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-016-3421-2

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