Purpose

Extending the holistic research on corporate reputation (CR), the authors examine whether and how single CR dimensions affect consumers' intentional loyalty toward multinational corporations (MNCs) across nations. They study the dimensions of the predominant customer-based CR scale of Walsh and Beatty (2007): customer orientation, product range quality, social/environmental responsibility, good employer and reliability/financial strength. Furthermore, important country-level moderators – embeddedness and country development – are studied.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors refer to hierarchical data on 32,811 consumer evaluations of a MNC in 44 countries using the still novel method of multilevel structural equation modeling.

Findings

The results underscore a strong relationship between CR in general and consumers' loyalty but identify different effects for the CR dimensions (e.g. product quality, social/environmental responsibility dominate). The important national institutions reinforce or diminish some – but not all – effects of the CR dimensions.

Practical implications

The results are of importance for finer-grained cross-national reputation management. Studying both national culture and country development shows that MNCs face tradeoff decisions. Accordingly, the authors provide a country portfolio, which offers options for standardized operations in groups of countries with similar country characteristics and CR effects.

Originality/value

Disentangling the five CR levers emphasizes that CR is not a pure signal of quality. Two main levers emerge: one stable across countries and one strongly depending on a country's degree of country development, for example. A finer-grained management of CR signals across nations is possible, especially in emerging countries, with increasing importance for MNCs.

中文翻译：

---

跨国公司声誉声誉维度的跨国角色

目的

作者扩展了对企业声誉（CR）的整体研究，研究了单个CR维度是否以及如何影响消费者对跨国公司（MNC）的故意忠诚度。他们研究了Walsh和Beatty（2007）基于客户的主要CR量表的维度：客户导向，产品范围质量，社会/环境责任，良好的雇主以及可靠性/财务实力。此外，还研究了重要的国家级主持人-嵌入性和国家发展。

设计/方法/方法

作者使用仍然新颖的多层结构方程建模方法，参考了44个国家/地区的32,811个跨国公司消费者评估的分层数据。

发现

结果强调了一般责任感与消费者忠诚度之间的密切关系，但确定了不同的责任感影响（例如，产品质量，社会/环境责任占主导）。重要的国家机构加强或减少了企业责任范围的某些（但不是全部）影响。

实际影响

结果对于更精细的跨国声誉管理非常重要。对民族文化和国家发展的研究表明，跨国公司面临权衡决策。因此，作者提供了一个国家组合，为具有相似国家特征和CR影响的国家组中的标准化运营提供了选择。

创意/价值

弄清五个CR杠杆将强调CR不是纯粹的质量信号。出现了两个主要杠杆：例如，一个跨国家稳定的杠杆和一个强烈取决于一个国家的国家发展程度的杠杆。跨国公司对CR信号进行更细粒度的管理是可能的，尤其是在新兴国家，这对跨国公司越来越重要。