Measuring corporate reputation: A scale proposal for airlines

In the competitive environment brought by liberalization, airline companies need to manage their corporate reputations well in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors in the eyes of their stakeholders and to keep their competitive power in the global market. From this point of view, in this study, which aims to develop a corporate reputation scale specific to airlines, a combined method approach including both qualitative and quantitative techniques, has been adopted. Qualitative as airlines and their stakeholders are asked to convey how they define airline reputation; by means of the developed scale, quantitative research methods were used together to measure the effect of corporate reputation factors on the corporate structure. The process of developing the scale, it consists of three stages, creating the item pool, structuring and evaluating the scale. First of all, the conceptual infrastructure has been drawn by making use of the literature and the definition of the concept of corporate reputation has been made. Subsequently, via literature review and semi-structured interviews (N=25), the possible corporate reputation indicators of the airline company have been determined and a item pool has been created. In the item pool, simplification studies were carried out in line with the opinions of experts and academicians, and a pilot application was carried out within the scope of structuring the scale. In order to evaluate the 57-item scale obtained as a result of completion the configuration of the scale, Exploratory Factor Analysis (CFA) has been applied to a sample of 206. In order to verify the single factor structure of the 52-item scale obtained as a result of CFA, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed on a separate data set of 230 people. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) has been performed. DFA results are χ² / sd = 1.61, RMSEA = 0.070, CFI = 1.00, GFI = 0.97, and the reliability coefficient of the scale is 0.969. As a result of the research, a one-dimensional and 50-variable scale with proven validity and reliability that can measure corporate reputation for airlines has been developed and verified. Keywords: Corporate Reputation, Measuring Corporate Reputation, Aviation, Airline Business, Scale Development.