As the purpose of Public Relations is to establish and develop long-term beneficial relationships between an organization and the publics, so the effectiveness of PR should be evaluated through the quality of relationships between them. In this contex...
As the purpose of Public Relations is to establish and develop long-term beneficial relationships between an organization and the publics, so the effectiveness of PR should be evaluated through the quality of relationships between them. In this context, a study on the measurement instrument and effect of organization-public relationships (OPR) is important to build a theoretical basis and to come up to the ultimate value of PR fields. what is aimed at from this research is both to develop the OPR measurement scale which can be applied to estimating against various types of publics and is appropriated for the relational context in Korean culture and to investigate the causal relationship among PR communication variables.
The major findings of this study are as follows. First, 3 factors are identified from the result of scale purification though exploratory factor analysis. The results demonstrate that 'commitment', 'communication symmetry', and 'community involvement' are visible constructs for measuring OPRs. In the second step, the confirmatory factor analysis has yielded a measurement model, which consists of commitment, communication symmetry and community involvement to check whether the measurement model comprising three factors has a moderate model fit and structural validity. The results show that the measurement model has a satisfactory model fit with Chi-sqaure=308.653, df=116, p=.000, SRMR=.0495, CFI=.933. The Cronbach's Alpha is .96 for commitment, .73 for communication symmetry, and .83 for community involvement. Consequently, inspection of the fit statistics for the proposed model reveals that the model proves to be acceptable and the scales proposed in this research have a high level of reliability and validity.
Second, the causal relationship among PR communication effect variables is investigated in this study. First of all, PR communication effect variables are divided into relationship dimension (OPRs), organization dimension (corporate image, reputation) and public dimension (satisfaction, loyalty). In the second step, as the result of comparative fit analysis on each of PR communication effect hierarchy model, [relationship → organization → public] effect hierarchy model is better fit to the data than other effect hierarchy models (Chi-sqaure=78.297, df=12, p=.000, SRMR=.0318, CFI=.953). For model comparison, the above model, among its competing models, provides the smallest AIC value (AIC=110.297). Finally, the causal relationship among PR communication effect variables is examined by path analysis. Results from path analysis reveals that path coefficients for from communication symmetry to corporate image and reputation are not significant. Besides, the remainings 8 path coefficients are statistically significant. Based on this result, the modified model is suggested to be the causal relationship model among PR communication effect variables in consideration of parsimony and path coefficient.
In conclusion, this research suggests both the OPR measurement instrument which can be applied to estimating against various types of publics and is appropriated for the relational context in Korean culture and the causal relationship model among PR communication variables. These findings derived from this research are expected to contribute to building a new theory of PR centered on relationship management and to expend the discussion for effectiveness of PR communication.