Employer Brand Personality (EBP) - Development and Validation of a Scale

For some years now, the recruitment and retention of employees has been a key challenge for companies (Moroko and Uncles 2008; Carpentier et al. 2017). The increased competition among organizations regarding attracting and retaining talented employees – often referred to as “war for talent” (Chambers et al. 1998) – is driven by numerous developments: for example, the decline of birth rates and, thus, an ageing population; a shortage of highly qualified workers; a change in values in the society; and increasing globalization (Bhattacharya, Sen, and Korschun 2008; Rosengren and Bengtsson 2014). Since employer brand attractiveness is linked to an employee’s attraction and retention to an employer (e.g., Knox and Freeman 2006), companies faced with a competitive job market need to establish an attractive image as an employer. Attraction and retention of talented personnel, in turn, is a prerequisite for delivering high product and service quality to the customer (Rampl and Kenning 2014).
The above explanations show that employees are a key source for achieving competitive advantage (Brymer, Molloy, and Gilbert 2014). Building on this notion, scholars have investigated the antecedents of employer brand attractiveness from the perspective of potential and current employees (e.g., Cable and Judge 1994; Highhouse et al. 1999; Lievens et al. 2001; Van Hoye et al. 2013). They have identified a plethora of factors that affect employer brand attractiveness. A well-known and often adopted approach is the instrumental-symbolic framework of Lievens and Highhouse (2003). The researchers differentiate between instrumental benefits and symbolic benefits of an employer brand and provide empirical evidence for their impact on employer brand attractiveness. Instrumental benefits refer to the job or organization “in terms of objective, concrete, and factual attributes that a job/an organization either has or does not have” (Lievens and Highhouse 2003, p. 80). Thus, they relate to job and organizational characteristics like pay, job security, or travel opportunity (Lievens 2007). In contrast, symbolic benefits refer to the job or organization “in terms of subjective and intangible attributes” (Lievens and Highhouse 2003, p. 81). Specifically, symbolic attributes often relate to trait inferences (e.g., competence or sincerity) potential or current employees ascribe to an employer (Lievens and Slaughter 2016).
The symbolic meaning of an employer brand is reflected in the concept of the employer brand personality. Building on the findings from the consumer-related brand personality construct, an employer brand personality helps employees to express their own identity (Rampl and Kenning 2014). The concept of employer brand personality (EBP), therefore, is of crucial relevance for employer brand management because it gives managers a better understanding of employees who express themselves by applying and working for the employer brand.
While there are some studies that consider brand personality in an employer context (e.g., Lievens and Highhouse 2003; Rampl and Kenning 2014), these studies primarily adopted the measurement scale developed by Aaker (1997) which is oriented towards consumers. However, it is reasonable to assume that the structure of personality traits consumers ascribe to consumer brands is not be the same as the structure of trait inferences employees associate with employer brands. Consequently, it is possible that some personality characteristics of an employer brand have not been considered so far.
The purpose of this study is to develop and empirically validate a scale for measuring EBP. There are several contributions of this study: First, we contribute to the internal marketing and brand personality literature by providing a deeper understanding of the EBP construct.
Second, marketing practitioners can utilize the scale to assess the personality of their own employer brand and compare it with the personality of competing employer brands