Give the Emperor a Mirror: Toward Developing a Stakeholder Measurement of Organizational Transparency

Abstract The concept of organizational transparency has vaulted to prominence in recent years. While the virtues of transparency have been tied to trust and credibility, there have been no efforts to measure this abstract concept. Guidelines exist to help organizations be more transparent, but the real test is how stakeholders perceive an organization's transparency. This paper focuses on developing a stakeholder measurement of organizational transparency. Factor analyses, structural equation models, and reliability alphas on the measurement items indicate the instrument measures three transparency reputation traits (integrity, respect for others, openness) and four transparency efforts (participation, substantial information, accountability, and secrecy). Acknowledgments The author thanks Mark Carpenter for his invaluable assistance with this research. Notes aExtraction method: Maximum likelihood. Rotation method: Varimax with Kaiser normalization. bExtraction method: Maximum likelihood. Extraction Method: Maximum Likelihood. Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization.