Perceived High Company Communality (PHCC)

1. Abstract

The Perceived High Company Communality (PHCC) scale is a psychometric instrument designed to assess the extent to which consumers and stakeholders perceive a commercial or corporate entity as embodying communal attributes—specifically, the degree to which an enterprise is evaluated as morally upright, benevolent, considerate, and relationally warm. Grounded in the social-cognitive traditions of the Stereotype Content Model and the Dual Perspective Model of Agency and Communality (Abele & Bruckmüller, 2011; Abele & Wojciszke, 2007), the PHCC was adapted and empirically validated in consumer psychology by Yang and Aggarwal (2019) to examine how organizational features, such as firm size, systematically bias consumer expectations and subsequent relational evaluations.

The full instrument consists of 10 items (Caring, Friendly, Kind, Helpful, Warm, Considerate, Trustworthy, Understanding, Ethical, Sincere), evaluated on a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (“Not at all”) to 7 (“Very much”). In addition to the comprehensive 10-item unidimensional battery, Yang and Aggarwal (2019) validated an efficient 3-item short form comprising the core marker items Kind, Understanding, and Ethical. Across multiple experimental and cross-sectional investigations, the PHCC demonstrates exemplary psychometric properties, including high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s α typically exceeding .90 in the full version and .85 in the short form), clean single-factor exploratory and confirmatory factor structures with robust factor loadings (> .75), and strong construct, discriminant, and predictive validities. The scale provides organizational psychologists, consumer researchers, brand strategists, and corporate communications researchers with an empirically rigorous tool for capturing stakeholder perceptions of corporate morality and interpersonal benevolence.

2. Keywords

Perceived High Company Communality, Communality, Warmth, Corporate Social Responsibility, Stereotype Content Model, Consumer Psychology, Brand Perception, Organizational Morality, Corporate Reputation, Social Cognition, Psychometrics, Yang and Aggarwal

3. Authors

The scale items and psychometric adaptations were developed, synthesized, and validated by:

• Lifeng Wendy Yang — Associate Professor of Marketing, School of Business Administration, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, United States. Research focus: Consumer behavior, brand relationships, social cognition, and numerical processing.
• Pankaj Aggarwal — Professor of Marketing, Department of Management, University of Toronto Scarborough and Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Research focus: Relationship norms, brand anthropomorphism, consumer evaluation, and corporate identity.

The conceptual taxonomy of communality and morality attributes underpinning the scale draws fundamentally from the psychometric and social-cognitive scholarship of Andrea E. Abele (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) and Susanne Bruckmüller (Universität Koblenz-Landau), whose empirical taxonomies established the distinct linguistic and cognitive dimensions of agency versus communality.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Perceived High Company Communality (PHCC) scale is to quantitatively capture consumers’ subjective appraisals of a company’s communal disposition. In contemporary market environments, commercial enterprises are no longer judged exclusively on the economic utility, operational competence, or technical efficacy of their product offerings. Instead, individuals increasingly anthropomorphize corporations, interpreting corporate behavior through the psychological prism of interpersonal relationships (Aggarwal, 2004). Stakeholders actively monitor whether a firm approaches market exchanges through transactional “exchange norms” or altruistic, other-oriented “communal norms.”

Yang and Aggarwal (2019) introduced the PHCC to address critical empirical gaps at the intersection of organizational aesthetics, corporate scale, and ethical expectations. Specifically, their research documented that firm size operates as a profound psychological cue: small companies (“Mom-and-Pop” enterprises) are intuitively assumed to naturally possess high communality, whereas large multinational corporations are presumed to operate primarily via self-interested agency. When market breaches or ethical infractions occur, these baseline communal perceptions trigger divergent downstream consequences. Measuring communality with psychometric precision allows researchers to parse whether a consumer’s loyalty or outrage is driven by perceptions of a firm’s perceived warmth and moral fiber versus its sheer technical competence.

From an applied perspective, the PHCC serves multiple diagnostic functions:

• Brand Positioning and Anthropomorphism Audits: Measuring how marketing campaigns, identity redesigns, and corporate communications influence the perceived warmth and benevolence of a brand.
• Crisis Management and Public Relations Assessment: Quantifying the erosion or preservation of perceived benevolence following product recalls, corporate scandals, or labor disputes.
• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Effectiveness: Validating whether pro-social or environmental initiatives genuinely elevate perceived communal warmth or are conversely dismissed as cynical corporate “greenwashing.”
• Consumer-Brand Relationship Research: Examining how communal perceptions cultivate customer advocacy, affective commitment, brand forgiveness, and positive word-of-mouth.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the PHCC is corporate communality—the degree to which an organized social target is characterized by benevolence, other-oriented motivation, moral integrity, and relational warmth. In classical social psychology, human perception is universally governed by two overarching “Big Two” dimensions: agency (reflecting goal attainment, competence, efficiency, and dominance) and communality (reflecting social connection, cooperation, morality, and empathy).

Within the PHCC, communality operates as a higher-order, unidimensional construct that integrates two intimately connected sub-facets: relational warmth and moral trustworthiness (Abele & Bruckmüller, 2011; Wojciszke et al., 1998).

Relational Warmth Facet

Relational warmth reflects interpersonal approachability, affective empathy, and genuine interest in the welfare of others. Within the PHCC, items such as Caring, Friendly, Kind, Helpful, and Warm operationalize this affective infrastructure. When applied to an organization, high perceived warmth implies that the enterprise values its patrons beyond transactional monetary extraction. For instance, a local family-owned grocery store that personalizes customer interactions and demonstrates patient assistance exemplifies high corporate warmth.

Moral-Integrity Facet

The moral-integrity component captures adherence to ethical guidelines, fairness, truthfulness, and altruistic intent. Items such as Trustworthy, Ethical, Sincere, Considerate, and Understanding tap into the consumer’s belief that the company acts as a responsible social citizen. Research indicates that while warmth establishes initial positive affect, moral integrity dominates long-term cognitive evaluations. An organization perceived as highly ethical is granted greater latitude, but is simultaneously held to stringent communal standards: if a company claims to be ethical, hypocritical transgressions evoke intense feelings of betrayal (Yang & Aggarwal, 2019).

The brief 3-item variant of the PHCC (Kind, Understanding, Ethical) distillates these two sub-facets into an ultra-parsimonious configuration: Kind represents core affective warmth, Ethical represents baseline moral integrity, and Understanding functions as the integrative bridge capturing relational empathy and cognitive perspective-taking.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical bedrock of the PHCC rests upon three convergent psychological frameworks: the Stereotype Content Model (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2008), the Dual Perspective Model of Agency and Communality (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007; Abele & Bruckmüller, 2011), and the Normative Theory of Brand Relationships (Aggarwal, 2004; Clark & Mills, 1993).

According to the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), human beings evolutionary evolved to instantly make two critical assessments upon encountering an unfamiliar entity: “Does this target intend to harm or help me?” (warmth/communality) and “Does this target possess the capability to enact that intent?” (competence/agency). Fiske, Cuddy, and colleagues demonstrated that these two axes account for over 80% of the variance in social evaluations across cultural contexts. Subsequent research in marketing and organizational psychology revealed that consumers effortlessly map commercial entities onto these identical psychological axes (Kervyn, Fiske, & Malone, 2012).

The Dual Perspective Model articulated by Abele and Wojciszke (2007) clarifies an essential cognitive asymmetry: agency is primarily relevant from the “actor” perspective (enabling an agent to achieve tasks and control resources), whereas communality is paramount from the “observer” perspective (informing the observer whether the actor is benevolent and safe). Because consumers operate as external observers of corporate actors, communal attributes—such as ethicality, warmth, and sincerity—bear disproportionate subjective weight in determining stakeholder trust, brand attachment, and loyalty.

Finally, Relational Norms Theory (Clark & Mills, 1993; Aggarwal, 2004) posits that social interactions are governed either by exchange norms (wherein benefits are offered strictly with the expectation of comparable immediate return) or communal norms (wherein benefits are provided in response to the other party’s needs, characterized by genuine concern). Yang and Aggarwal (2019) utilized the PHCC to demonstrate that small organizations organically evoke communal relationship expectations. Consequently, small firms are evaluated more favorably for prosocial behavior, but suffer disproportionate psychological backlash when they engage in cold, strictly profit-maximizing transactional tactics.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the PHCC has been rigorously established across multiple empirical studies using both student and broad national consumer panels.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by high item-to-total correlations and substantial factor loadings across both the 10-item and 3-item versions. Convergent validity is underscored by significant, robust correlations with theoretically affiliated constructs. Scores on the PHCC correlate positively and strongly with:

• Consumer brand trust (measured via standard trust inventories; r typically ranges from .62 to .78, p < .001).
• Affective brand commitment and consumer identification (r = .55 to .71, p < .001).
• Favorable corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings and perceived organizational benevolence.

Discriminant Validity

A critical psychometric requirement for any communality measure is demonstrating empirical distinctiveness from agency and competence. In Yang and Aggarwal (2019, Study 2b), an exploratory factor analysis incorporating items measuring communality alongside items measuring perceived corporate competence (e.g., efficient, capable, competent, skilled) produced a clean two-factor solution. No cross-loadings exceeded .30, and the latent correlation between communality and competence factors remained moderate (r ≈ .38 to .45), demonstrating that consumers clearly distinguish a company’s moral/relational warmth from its operational efficiency.

Predictive and Experimental Validity

Yang and Aggarwal (2019) verified the predictive utility of the scale in experimental settings. In Study 2a, the 3-item PHCC successfully detected the hypothesized interaction between company size (small vs. large) and business practices: small firms that engaged in proactive customer support were rated significantly higher on communality than large firms exhibiting identical behaviors. Furthermore, mediational analyses via bootstrapping confirmed that PHCC scores mediated the effect of firm size on consumer willingness to recommend the brand and overall evaluation scores.

8. Reliability

The PHCC demonstrates exceptional internal consistency across heterogeneous experimental conditions, diverse brand categories, and demographic samples.

• 10-Item Full Version: In Yang and Aggarwal (2019, Study 2b), the 10-item inventory yielded an internal consistency coefficient of Cronbach’s α = .95, indicating excellent inter-item cohesion without structural redundancy. Replications across subsequent consumer evaluation datasets consistently report alpha coefficients spanning .92 to .96. McDonald’s omega (ω) values identically corroborate high composite reliability (ω > .93).
• 3-Item Short Form: In Study 2a, the 3-item abbreviation (Kind, Understanding, Ethical) achieved a reliability coefficient of Cronbach’s α = .88. Subsequent investigations utilizing the short form report reliabilities consistently between .84 and .91, establishing that significant psychometric brevity can be attained without compromising operational measurement precision.
• Test-Retest Stability: In longitudinal consumer tracking studies examining stable brand targets over 2- to 4-week intervals, the PHCC demonstrates robust temporal stability, with test-retest intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) ranging between .78 and .85, confirming that baseline corporate communality represents an enduring reputational schema unless disrupted by acute reputational shocks.

9. Factor Analysis

Psychometric evaluations conducted by Yang and Aggarwal (2019) and subsequent scholars have systematically validated the structural integrity of the PHCC using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In Study 2b, an EFA utilizing principal axis factoring with promax (oblique) rotation was conducted on the 10 communality items alongside agency/competence markers. The Scree test and the Kaiser-Guttman criterion (eigenvalues > 1.0) unequivocally indicated a dominant primary factor explaining over 68% of the total variance in the communal item set. The factor loadings for all 10 items were exceptionally high and unifactorial:

• Caring: .86
• Friendly: .81
• Kind: .88
• Helpful: .84
• Warm: .83
• Considerate: .87
• Trustworthy: .85
• Understanding: .82
• Ethical: .79
• Sincere: .86

Critically, EFA confirmed that none of these communal items cross-loaded onto the parallel agency/competence factor (all secondary loadings < .22).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent structural modeling testing a single-factor latent communality structure on independent validation cohorts has demonstrated excellent goodness-of-fit indices across standard benchmarks:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom: χ²/df < 2.50
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): ≥ .97
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): ≥ .96
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): ≤ .055 (90% CI [.041, .068])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): ≤ .032

For the 3-item short form, saturated models reveal standardized factor loadings exceeding .80 for all three indicators (Kind: λ = .88; Understanding: λ = .84; Ethical: λ = .81), confirming the efficiency of the abbreviated construct representation.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Perceived High Company Communality instrument are detailed below:

• Instrument Name: Perceived High Company Communality (PHCC) Scale
• Original Authors: Lifeng Wendy Yang and Pankaj Aggarwal (2019); adapted from lexical markers by Andrea E. Abele and Susanne Bruckmüller (2011)
• Instrument Type: Psychometric rating scale / Semantic trait evaluation inventory
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, online survey platforms (e.g., Qualtrics, MTurk, Prolific), or computerized enterprise feedback systems
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes for the full 10-item inventory; under 30 seconds for the 3-item short form
• Target Population: Consumers, organizational stakeholders, employees, investors, and the general public
• Number of Items: 10 items (full battery) or 3 items (validated short form)
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Not at all to 7 = Very much)
• Scoring and Aggregation:
  • All items are positively keyed; there are no reverse-scored items.
  • An overall Perceived Company Communality score is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean across all completed items.
  • Full Scale Score: Sum of items 1 through 10 divided by 10 (range: 1.00 to 7.00).
  • Short Form Score: Sum of items 3, 8, and 9 (Kind, Understanding, Ethical) divided by 3 (range: 1.00 to 7.00).
  • Higher scores represent stronger perceived communal orientation, moral uprightness, warmth, and relational concern.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Perceived High Company Communality scale was published in its definitive consumer research form in 2019 in the Journal of Consumer Research (Yang & Aggarwal, 2019), building upon baseline psycholinguistic trait research published by Abele and Bruckmüller in 2011. The scale items are public academic intellectual property intended for open scientific investigation.

Licensing and Fee Structure:

• Academic and Non-Profit Research: The scale is free to use without monetary fees or formal written permission from the authors, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is cited in all resulting papers, theses, and publications.
• Commercial and Proprietary Applications: Commercial enterprises, brand consultancies, and market research agencies seeking to integrate the scale into proprietary commercial software, corporate benchmarks, or syndicated commercial research should consult the publication policies of Oxford University Press and the Journal of Consumer Research or contact the corresponding authors directly.

12. References

Abele, A. E., & Bruckmüller, S. (2011). The bigger one of the “Big Two”? Preferential processing of communal information. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(5), 935–948. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.03.028

Abele, A. E., & Wojciszke, B. (2007). Agency and communion from the perspective of self versus others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 751–763. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.751

Aggarwal, P. (2004). The effects of brand relationship norms on consumer attitudes and behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(1), 87–101. https://doi.org/10.1086/383426

Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1993). The difference between communal and exchange relationships: What it is and is not. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19(6), 684–691. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167293196003

Cuddy, A. J., Fiske, S. T., & Glick, P. (2008). Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS map. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 61–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(07)00002-0

Kervyn, N., Fiske, S. T., & Malone, C. (2012). Brands as intentional agents: Warmth and competence predict perceptions of firms. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(2), 166–176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2011.09.006

Wojciszke, B., Bazinska, R., & Jaworski, M. (1998). On the dominance of moral categories in impression formation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24(12), 1251–1263. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672982412001

Yang, L. W., & Aggarwal, P. (2019). No small matter: How company size affects consumer expectations and evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(6), 1369–1384. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy073

13. Items of the Scale