Organizational Prestige Components on Job Application as Prioritized by Graduating Students of College of Arts and Sciences University of the Philippines Manila, SY 2008-2009

Abstract

The role of organizational prestige in the field of job application has not been fully examined yet because of a lack of studies regarding the said field. The corporate image and corporate reputation has been proven to have an effect on applicants as what was found in foreign studies before (Half, 1993 and Barber, 1998). Organizational prestige, as will be defined in this study based from Fombrun (1996) and Smidts. van Riel, & Pruyn (2000), is the perceived reputation of an organization’s success in the following aspects: (1) quality of management, (2) quality of services and products, (3) long-term investment, (4) innovativeness, (5) financial stability, (6) capability to recruit, develop and maintain its human resources or simply human resource management, (7) relationship with the community and environment or simply corporate social responsibility (CSR) and (8) the use of corporate assets. The researcher aims to determine if organizational prestige is a factor considered by graduating students in job applications and, if yes, what factors do they prioritize. The researcher is also concerned about the respondents’ perception of what organizational prestige includes and if sex, and degree programs is related in their choices. Also, this study will establish whether the eight components are related to each other. Gathering a sample of 130 graduating students from different nine degree programs in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of the Philippines Manila SY 2008-2009, the researcher conducted a one-shot four-scale survey using stratified convenience sampling. The results showed that organizational prestige is an important factor in job application considered by all graduating students of CAS-UPM (92%). In addition, graduating students’ perception of organizational prestige includes corporate social responsibility, financial stability, human resources management, quality of management and long-term investment. In the perspective of the graduating students, they ranked the organizational prestige components (from highest to lowest) as follows: (1) innovativeness, (2) quality of products and services, (3) corporate social responsibility, (4) long-term investment value, (5) financial stability, (6) human resources management, (7) use of corporate assets and (8) quality of management. It was also found that sex has an effect on the priority factors of graduating students as shown by the third preference of the males and females-female respondents seem to regard human resources management as more important (third highest ranked factor among females) than quality management which the male respondents clearly prefer (third highest ranked factor among males). Degree programs, in addition, seem to influence the priority factors of graduating students. Finally, the component "use of corporate assets" was found to be highly related with the components "innovativeness" and "financial stability."