Emotional Labor as a Reputation Management Technique in Service Organizations

Concept Of Reputation Management And Its Theoretical Foundations

A company’s reputation is determined over time by its stakeholders’ collective judgements of the company’s financial, social, and environmental effects and activities (Barnett et al., 2006). These judgements are related to how positively or negatively the stakeholders perceive the organization in comparison to its competitors, based on the organization’s history of consistent performance and effective communication. Stakeholders include customers, suppliers, retailers, financial institutions, shareholders, the general public, and employees. A company’s reputation with each of these groups affects stakeholders’ decisions to support (or not support) the company. Each stakeholder group is interested in different organizational characteristics. For example, whereas customers are interested in product price, quality, and reliability, financial institutions are interested in financial performance and employees are concerned with wage policies, working conditions, and other personnel policies. For this reason, companies should design their reputation management applications in accordance with the expectations and interests of each stakeholder group, while also creating a coherent image across the different groups (Gray and Balmer, 1998).