Organizational Identity, Image, and Reputation: Examining the Influence on Perceptions of Employer Attractiveness in Public Sector Organizations

ABSTRACT

The active management of an organization’s image, identity and overall reputation can result in a range of benefits including attracting larger and higher quality job applicant pools, fostering an improved overall impression of the firm in potential employees’ minds and retaining and engendering loyalty amongst current employees. How these concepts apply in the public sector remains nascent. This paper reviews the extant literature on identity, image, and reputation and identifies how and why these concepts are salient for exploring current and potential employees’ perceptions of the public sector as an employer. A conceptual model is developed through reviewing organizational characteristics of public sector entities and proposing how these may influence employees’ image, identity and reputation perceptions of the employer attractiveness of the sector.

KEYWORDS:

• Public sector employer attractiveness
• Corporate reputation
• image
• identity
• Applying marketing concepts to the public sector