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INTRODUCTION
'Reputation' is increasingly recognized for its influence on stakeholder support and engagement with companies (Fombrun, 1996, 2012). Both researchers and practitioners would therefore benefit from having a rigorous instrument to measure reputations and the ability to develop predictive models of reputation's impact on stakeholder outcomes. Recognizing a growing need by both practitioners and academics for a better conceptual and empirical tool for assessing and managing reputation - and the lack of validated instruments for doing so - Reputation Institute launched a global project in 1998 to understand and measure the diverse factors associated with corporate reputation. The first measurement instrument that resulted from our initial exploration was the Reputation Quotient (RQ), a six-dimension scale constructed from 20 attributes (Fombrun et al. , 2000). The four-attribute RepTrak® Pulse measure was pulled out of the RQ in 2005 and used to create a separate measure of a person's emotional attachment to a company (eg, Christian, 1959). Ponzi et al. (2011) demonstrated the reliability and validity of the RepTrak® Pulse scale as a measure of reputation, and since 2005 it has been extensively tested and shown to have high face and content validity (Sarstedt et al. , 2013).
The full RepTrak® System was created in 2005-2006 to provide executives with an analytical instrument that could be used, not only to track and assess stakeholder perceptions of companies, but that would also enable a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying informational drivers of reputation that elicit emotional attachment. The system is based on measuring a company's overall reputation using the RepTrak® Pulse and decomposing that emotional attachment into an underlying set of dimensions and attributes, and predicting their effects on stakeholder support.
The rigorous methodological underpinnings of the model and its validation have not been reported publicly to date, limiting the ability researchers and practitioners have to use the dimensions in their work. The purpose of this paper is to report empirical tests done to validate the seven dimensions of the RepTrak® System and predict corporate reputation and stakeholder support across five stakeholder groups in six countries.
The RepTrak® System recognizes the fact that a company's overall reputation is rooted in the perceptions of its stakeholders (Newburry, 2010), each of which responds to different signals or informational inputs...