Organizational reputation and staff retention in the constitutional autonomous agencies in Mexico

Abstract

This thesis is located in the debate on human resources management in public administration. The low confidence that citizens have in the bureaucracy and government institutions has negative implications for agencies’ human resource management—for instance, in attracting and retaining staff. Therefore, a deeper analysis of how public agencies are perceived, not only by citizens but by the different audiences that interact with them is needed. Within this debate, organizational reputation management is an alternative that works to protect organizations against potential external attacks, achieve superior results, or increase trust in institutions and administrative agents. It can also help public organizations to communicate with their audiences to, among other things, gain autonomy and power, better coordinate with other government entities, or improve human resources management. As public administration depends on bureaucracy as a critical element in delivering goods and services, it will be necessary for organizations to retain their best employees to improve their outcomes and thereby improve perceptions vis-à-vis their multiple audiences. In this sense, this thesis explores the concept of organizational reputation and analyzes reputation management as an alternative tool to retain valuable public employees. The first article in this work consists of a systematic literature review that analyzes the concept of organizational reputation in the context of public administration. This article answers essential questions to understand how the organizational reputation process develops in the public sector. The work analyzes 119 articles and seven books to review five critical aspects of this literature: its conceptualization, the types of reputation used in the literature, the antecedents identified as relevant in the process of organizational reputation, the results (or consequences) of using reputational lenses, and the multidimensionality of the concept. The second article focuses on studying the relationship between public organizations’ audiences and the multidimensionality of reputation. This work questions whether all audiences perceive multidimensionality in the same way. To answer this question, the responses of two audiences to a survey that measures organizational reputation in the Constitutional Autonomous Agencies in Mexico are examined employing a factor analysis. The results show that the public does perceive reputation differently since each audience has different characteristics and interests that influence their evaluation of the agencies. Finally, the third article examines the relationship between organizational reputation and staff retention in the Constitutional Autonomous Agencies in Mexico. Based on a survey of employees of five agencies, the article shows that having a positive reputation is crucial for public employees when deciding whether to remain or leave their jobs. The results imply that building and maintaining a positive reputation must be relevant for public managers due to its implications for human resource management.