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ABSTRACT
How employees and customers perceive the reputation of an organization will influence their behavior towards it. Particularly in a service business, the perspectives of employee and customer are seen as interdependent. Gaps between the two have been seen as potential causes of crises. Reported here is the development of a corporate character scale to assess the reputation of an organization from both perspectives. Potential dimensions and items are drawn from relevant literatures and from primary research. Surveys of 2,061 employees and 2,565 customers in 49 different business units of 13 organizations are used to provide data. Five major and two minor dimensions of corporate character are identified. These are labeled: Agreeableness (honest, socially responsible); Competence (reliable, ambitious); Enterprise (innovative, daring); Ruthlessness (arrogant, controlling); Chic (stylish, exclusive); Informality (easy going) and Machismo (tough). The practical implications of the dimensions and the items used to measure them are discussed, including an analysis of those aspects of corporate character that correlate with customer and employee satisfaction.
INTRODUCTION
A number of models of organization reputation see the customer and employee perspectives as being inter-linked or interdependent (Hatch and Schultz, 1997; Fombrun, 1996; Davies and Miles, 1998). If a customer-facing employee and the customer share a positive view of the organization then a positive interaction between them is more likely to occur. Specifically, the view that customer-facing employees have of their organization is held to influence the impression that customers form of the organization (de Chernatony, 1999) because the contact between customers and employees can shape the image customers hold of it (Bettencourt et ai, 2001). Customers catch the displayed emotions of employees through a process of 'emotional contagion' and this affects their image of the service they receive (Pugh, 2001). This is likely to be more important in organizations with a high level of interaction between employees and customers, for example services such as hotels, restaurants and fashion stores. What managers do inside such companies can affect how the customer is treated and how the customer regards the provider. For example, how employees are rewarded will affect their relationships with customers (Rousseau and Wadc-Dcnzoni, 1994). If there are links between the internal and external perspectives, then the potential exists to influence both simultaneously. For example, a corporate...