When employer brand image aids employee satisfaction and engagement

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test whether employee characteristics (age, gender, role and experience) influence the effects of employer brand image, for warmth and competence, on employee satisfaction and engagement. Design/methodology/approach – Members of the public were surveyed as to their satisfaction and engagement with their employer and their view of their employer brand image. Half were asked to evaluate their employer’s “warmth” and half its “competence”. The influence of employee characteristics was tested on a “base model” linking employer image to satisfaction and engagement using a mediated moderation model. Findings – The base model proved valid; satisfaction partially mediates the influence of employer brand image on engagement. Age, experience gender, and whether the role involved customer contact moderate both the influence of the employer brand image and of satisfaction on engagement. Practical implications – Engagement varies with employee characteristics, and both segmenting employees and promoting the employer brand image differentially to specific groups are ways to counter this effect. Originality/value – The contexts in which employer brand image can influence employees in general and specific groups of employees in particular are not well understood. This is the first empirical study of the influence of employer brand image on employee engagement and one of few that considers the application of employee segmentation

Job Tenure in Britain: Employee Characteristics Versus Workplace Effects

We consider differences in current job tenure of individuals using linked employee and workplace data. This enables us to distinguish between variation in tenure associated with the characteristics of individual employees and those of the workplace in which they work. The various individual characteristics are, as a group, found to be essentially uncorrelated with the workplace effect, however, this is not true for women and non-white employees. We find that the lower tenure associated with membership of these demographic groups is predominantly captured by workplace effects suggesting some degree of labour market segmentation in Britain.Job tenure; individual; fixed-effects; voice; segmentation

The Roles of Employer and Employee Characteristics for Plant Productivity

Using a matched worker-plant data from Finnish manufacturing, the relationships of worker characteristics, wages, and productivity are examined. The process of linking various registers on employees and plants is described in detail. The final data set includes the characteristics of plants and their employees. The plant panel data is used for estimating productivity and wage profiles according to age and seniority. At low seniority productivity increases fast, but starts to decline early. Wage profiles are not related to productivity profiles, but continue to increase with seniority. These results support the hypothesis that human capital is not firm specific, and seniority related wages are used for incentive reasons. Various components of worker turnover have an impact on productivity growth.

Abusive supervision and employee perceptions of leaders' implicit followership theories

2014 Fall.In this study, I integrated research on abusive supervision and leaders' implicit followership theories (LIFTs; Sy, 2010). An important proposition of LIFTs theory is that matching between LIFTs and an employee's characteristics should yield the most positive employee outcomes; however, these matching effects in the LIFTs context have not yet been tested. Therefore, I examined the extent to which agreement and disagreement between employees' perceptions of their supervisor's LIFTs and employees' ratings of their own characteristics related to two outcomes - abusive supervision and LMX. Results from two samples of student employees supported the prediction that employee perceptions of supervisor LIFTs and their own characteristics would be associated with lower abusive supervision and higher LMX. In addition, perceived LIFTs and employee characteristics interacted such that employees who reported highly positive supervisor LIFTs and highly positive employee characteristics also reported the least abusive supervision and the highest quality relationships with their supervisor. The greater the discrepancy between employees' supervisor LIFTs ratings and their employee characteristics ratings, the higher the abusive supervision that they reported, supporting the matching hypothesis suggested by LIFTs theory. Finally, the level of discrepancy between employees' supervisor LIFTs ratings and their employee characteristics ratings significantly related to LMX only in one of the two samples, providing partial support for this hypothesis. Overall, this study shows that various combinations of perceived LIFTs and employee characteristics influence employee outcomes in important ways

Working Inflow, Outflow, and Churning

Linked employer-employee data from the Finnish business sector is used in an analysis of worker turnover. The data is an unbalanced panel with over 219 000 observations in the years 1991-97. The churning (excess worker turnover), worker inflow (hiring), and worker outflow (separation) rates are explained by various plant and employee characteristics in type 2 Tobit models where the explanatory variables can have a different effect on the probability of the flow rates to be non-zero and on the magnitude of the flow rate when it is positive. Most of the characteristics are defined as 5-group categorical variables defined for each industry separately in each year. We compare the Tobit results to OLS estimates, and also use weighting by plant employment. It turns out that weighted OLS results are fairly close to Tobit results. The probabilities of observing non-zero churning, inflow, and outflow rates increase with plant size. The magnitudes of the non-zero churning and inflow rates depend positively on size, but the magnitude of outflow rate negatively. High-wage plants have low turnover, whereas plants with large within-plant variation in wages have high turnover. Average tenure of employees has a negative impact on turnover. High plant employment growth increases churning and separation but reduces hiring in the next year. We also control various other plant and average employee characteristics like average age and education, shares of women and homeowners, foreign ownership, ownership changes, and regional unemployment.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39997/3/wp611.pd

Beyond Technological Diversification: The Impact of Employee Diversity on Innovation

This paper investigates the effect of employee diversity in terms of gender, age, ethnicity and education on the firm’s likelihood of introducing an innovation. The analysis draws on data from a recent innovation survey. This data is merged with a linked employer-employee dataset that allow us to identify the employee composition of each firm. We test the hypothesis that employee diversity is associated with better innovative performance. The econometric analysis reveals positive, negative and non-significant effects of the different employee characteristics on the likelihood of introducing an innovation.Diversity, Innovation, Education, Gender, Cultural Backgrund

Employee-workplace alignment: employee characteristics and perceived workplace requirements

Purpose – This paper aims to identify the employee characteristics which are most strongly associated with perceived requirements for different aspects of the workplace environment. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire was completed by 364 employees from a large private-sector organisation. Respondents were surveyed on different work-related, personality and demographic characteristics. They then completed a series of items measuring perceived requirements for four aspects of the workplace environment (workspace segregation, workspace territoriality, individual environmental control and aesthetic quality). Associations between employee characteristics and perceived workplace requirements were explored using multiple regression analyses. Findings – Numerous significant associations emerged. For example, the requirement for more segregated workspaces was associated with higher susceptibility to distraction, and the requirement for higher workspace territoriality was associated with less positive perceptions regarding the impact of flexible working on work effectiveness. Originality/value – The individual difference factors which moderate satisfaction with the workplace environment have received relatively little attention in past research. The present study addresses this knowledge gap by including a wider range of employee characteristics and comprehensively investigating which of these most strongly predict differences in perceived requirements for the workplace

Working Inflow, Outflow, and Churning

Linked employer-employee data from the Finnish business sector is used in an analysis of worker turnover. The data is an unbalanced panel with over 219 000 observations in the years 1991-97. The churning (excess worker turnover), worker inflow (hiring), and worker outflow (separation) rates are explained by various plant and employee characteristics in type 2 Tobit models where the explanatory variables can have a different effect on the probability of the flow rates to be non-zero and on the magnitude of the flow rate when it is positive. Most of the characteristics are defined as 5-group categorical variables defined for each industry separately in each year. We compare the Tobit results to OLS estimates, and also use weighting by plant employment. It turns out that weighted OLS results are fairly close to Tobit results. The probabilities of observing non-zero churning, inflow, and outflow rates increase with plant size. The magnitudes of the non-zero churning and inflow rates depend positively on size, but the magnitude of outflow rate negatively. High-wage plants have low turnover, whereas plants with large within-plant variation in wages have high turnover. Average tenure of employees has a negative impact on turnover. High plant employment growth increases churning and separation but reduces hiring in the next year. We also control various other plant and average employee characteristics like average age and education, shares of women and homeowners, foreign ownership, ownership changes, and regional unemployment.worker turnover, churning, employer-employee data

Employee characteristics: resilience and self-efficacy as protective factors

This study will explore the relationship between self-efficacy and resilience as they affect stress-related outcomes in the workplace. The study will first measure all participant’s self-efficacy and resilience. The experimental group will then receive feedback mirroring that of a negative performance appraisal. The feedback will suggest the participant performed below average on a trivia test. Participants in the control group will receive neutral feedback on the same trivia test. Lastly, all participant’s resilience will be measured a second time. This study will seek to recruit students from a local South-Eastern university. The results of this study will further clarify the relationship that exists between self-efficacy and resilience as well as further demonstrating the value of resilience as a protective factor

Learning Organization Characteristics Contributed to its Readiness-to-Change: A Study of the Thai Mobile Phone Service Industry

This paper aims to verify the relationship between Learning Organizations (LO) characteristics and an organization's readiness-to-change. LOs, based on a review of the literature, seem to have the competitive advantage of high readiness-to-change in today is economic business environment. The mobile service providers in Thailand are selected for this study. The results have shown a substantial relationship between readiness-to-change and the LO characteristics of cultural values, leadership commitment and empowerment, communication, knowledge transfer, employee characteristics, and performance upgrading. This study confirms that LO characteristics are correlated to an organization's readiness-to-change, suggesting that it is essential for organizations to develop into LOs in order to survive and/or prosper in a competitive and ever changing in business environment.