Employer brand choicea hierarchical value model and utility structure

Laburpena

The main objective of the present thesis is to deepen the study of employee preferences and propose a novel two-stage structure of the decision making process in the choice of job offers. Under the proposed model, individuals would evaluate in a subjective way the utility they obtain from each attribute offered by the employer and would analyze how these attributes contribute to higher value structures. This thesis is divided into three articles that take as reference the literature of decision theory and consumer behavior. The first article, “Are they willing to work for you?: An employee-centric view of employer brand attractiveness”, performed a systematic literature review on employer brand attraction to critically examine how the three notions of “employer attributes”, “employee benefits” and “perceived value” were studied in past literature, including the relationship that was assumed among them. As a result of the critical comparison between the tenets of means-ends analysis and past studies, it proposes a novel framework to study employer brands with an employee-centric view. The second article, “Are traditional industries doomed in the war for the best talent? A means-ends analysis”, aims to provide managerial solutions regarding how small businesses in traditional industries can become attractive employers of millennial first-job applicants as emerging technology-based firms. This study performs a means-ends analysis to unveil the hidden value structures of ethical, self-fulfilment and experiential value. Additionally, it disentangles the hierarchical relationships among employer attributes, employee benefits and perceived value. The results show that, by understanding the motivational structures underlying the employment choice, small businesses can customize their employment offerings and meet the value forms sought by the millennial cohort, opening a new range of possibilities for small traditional companies to attract new talent. The third article, “How do employees choose a job offer?: A discrete choice conjoint design”, conceptualizes and tests a decompositional, nonlinear framework to understand how employees choose among job offers that aims to overcome the limitations of composition methods and of linear decision making. In particular, two studies explore the employees’ decision-making process. First, a qualitative pre-study was conducted in order to explore the existence of noncompensatory attributes that make employees discard or select job offers on an initial screening. Second, a decompositional Adaptive Choice Based Conjoint (ACBC) analysis is performed to quantify and predict employee’s preferences of job offers. The results of the above mentioned studies define a threefold contribution to existing employer brand scholarship. First, by evidencing a hierarchical model of the employee value structures that explain employer attractiveness. Under this hierarchical model employees would subjectively evaluate the consequences or benefits that each employer attribute has for them and how it contributes to the achievement of higher value forms. The satisfaction of these higher-level values will be the main driver of the selection of employer attributes. Second, by demonstrating that employees do not evaluate employer attributes individually, but instead they assess job offerings as a whole, taking into consideration all the attributes that form them collectively. Third, it reveals that job applicants follow a two-stage, nonlinear decompositional process when selecting a job offer. In this process they first use noncompensatory decision rules to discard those job offers that do not meet nonnegotiable attributes; then compensatory trade-off rules are applied to evaluate the remaining alternatives on their overall reported utility.