The structural relationships between customer based corporate reputation, organisation public relationships, corporate social responsibility, perceived organisational culture and transparent communication

Customer-based corporate reputation (CBCR) has been identified as an emerging area of study in the field of corporate reputation. Yet, limited research has been conducted in this area. Thus, this study aims to investigate the antecedents and a mediator of CBCR in the context of the Nigerian insurance industry. Specifically, the study investigated the mediating effects of transparent communication on the relationships between organization-public relationships (OPR), corporate social responsibilities (CSR), perceived organizational culture (POC) and CBCR. This study adopts the Relational theory; Institutional theory and the Signalling theory to provide a theoretical foundation for the study. The researcher carried out a cross-sectional survey on 327 customers from three randomly selected insurance companies located in three major commercial cities in Nigeria. The study used Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the hypotheses. The result of the hypothesized direct relationships
between OPR, CSR and CBCR was supported, while the hypothesized relationship between POC and CBCR was not supported. Also, the hypothesized relationships between OPR, CSR, POC and TC were supported. With regard to the mediation hypotheses, a complementary mediation was observed in the OPR, CSR and CBCR while competitive (as the direct and the indirect effect have an opposing sign in the Path Coefficients) mediation was obtained on the relationship between POC and CBCR. The study recommends the need for insurance companies in Nigeria to aggressively engage in CSR activities that specifically focus on social equity with a view to encourage the most vulnerable to appreciate the importance of insurance services. Additionally, insurance companies stand to benefit substantially if they can reduce the opaque nature of their operations by putting in place a transparent communication structure that provides accurate and timely information for client positive customer based reputation assessment. On the overall, the findings are significant for the Nigerian Insurance Industry and has provided new additional insights to the literature of CBCR.