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Cross-cultural Assessment of a Short Scale to Measure Employees’ Company Reputation-Related Social Media Competence

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Abstract

Anything employees post on social media is in the public domain, where it can cause reputational damage to the company. As social media use continues to grow worldwide, employees’ imprudent social media uses appear to be on the rise. This article provides an assessment of the Walsh et al. (J Interact Mark 36:46–59, 2016) scale to measure employees’ company reputation-related social media competence (RSMC), which comprises five dimensions: technical competence, visibility awareness competence, knowledge competence, impact assessment competence, and social media communication competence. This research presents and assesses an abbreviated version of the RSMC scale which is some 40% shorter than the original 21-item scale, using data from three culturally distinct countries—Germany, China, and the United States. The findings suggest that the RSMC short scale is valid in all three national contexts, achieves partial metric invariance, and has equivalent predictive validity. The discussion outlines some implications for both managers and researchers.

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Notes

  1. The main scale refinement (n = 360; Study 1) and scale validation (n = 314; Study 2) efforts relied on German data.

  2. AMOS requires that one indicator per construct is constrained to equal 1, for technical reasons. Thus, compared with LISREL, the overall number of degrees of freedom is lower.

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Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Grant Number 02L12A250.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, Carl-Zeiss-Strasse 3, 07743, Jena, Germany

    Gianfranco Walsh

  2. University of Koblenz-Landau, 56070, Koblenz, Germany

    Mario Schaarschmidt

  3. University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada

    Lefa Teng

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  1. Gianfranco Walsh
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Correspondence to Gianfranco Walsh.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6 and 7.

Table 6 Item-to-total correlations
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Table 7 Dependent variables
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Walsh, G., Schaarschmidt, M. & Teng, L. Cross-cultural Assessment of a Short Scale to Measure Employees’ Company Reputation-Related Social Media Competence. Corp Reputation Rev 23, 78–91 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41299-019-00076-y

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