Research Into Corporate Reputation

In recent years, corporate reputation has drawn scholars’ andpractitioners’ considerable attention, and it becomes a frontier and hot issue.There are mainly three fields in corporate reputation research, including thedefinition and measurement of corporate reputation, construction of corporatereputation(drivers) and consequences of corporate reputation. Scholars haveobtained abundant achievements, however, many issues are still unresolved.On the one hand, there is no consensus on the definition of corporatereputation; on the other hand, research into construction is inadequate; andfinally, research into the relationship between corporate reputation andcustomer citizenship behaviors is void. Services provided by service firms,especially travel agency, are invisible. It is vital to reinforce customers’perception of service quality by reputation. As we know, customers are themost important stakeholders. For this reason, corporate reputation researchfrom customer perspective is significant and viable.The paper is conducted in the following aspects in the travel agencycontext:1. Review the definition of corporate reputation and ascertain thedifferences and similarities among them, then a definition is presented;2.Review measurement tools of corporate reputation and make comments, andthen a measurement model with two dimensions developed by Manfred(2004)is chose in this study;3. The drivers of corporate reputation are summarizedthrough literature review, then, they are applied in travel agency context inorder to establish the relationships between drivers and dimensions of travelagency reputation.4. Two dimensions of customer citizenshipbehaviors(helping company and positive word of mouth) are chose in thispaper. The relationship between travel agency reputation and customercitizenship behaviors is established based on organization identification theory,exchange theory, motive theory and cognitive consistency theory. An Internetsurvey is conducted to collect data which are analyzed with software SPSS16.0and LISREL8.70so as to examine the hypotheses proposed in thispaper.Three conclusions are concluded. Firstly, the measurement model withtwo dimensions developed by Manfred(2004) is applicable in travel agencycontext in China because it can measure travel agency reputationappropriately. Secondly, travel agency reputation is driven by quality factor,operation performance factor, social responsibility factor and attractivenessfactor except that both the effect of operation performance factor on affectivedimension and effect of social responsibility on cognitive dimension areinsignificant. Finally, the affective dimension of travel agency reputationpositively affects customers’ helping company behaviors and positive word-of–mouth and the cognitive dimension of travel agency reputation positivelyaffects customers’ word-of-mouth and negatively affects customers’ helpingcompany behaviors.