 Top employer awards: A double-edged sword?Anja Überschaer and Matthias Baum European Management Journal, 2020, vol. 38, issue 1, 146-156 Abstract: Organizations often use top employer awards to confirm their quality as employers via an independent third party. At first, the advantages of using awards seem apparent, such as giving the organization an edge in recruitment by increasing the organizational attractiveness for jobseekers. Possible disadvantages accompanying the use of awards have received little attention. We argue that awards can cause potential applicants to pay less attention to information provided in recruitment materials that allow them to assess their organizational fit. Therefore, we investigated the influence of awards on the relationship between person–organization fit and attraction to organization as well as application decision. We include the corporate brand awareness (unknown vs. well-known) as a boundary condition. The results of our experiment show that, while awards increase organizational attractiveness, they also reduce the effect of person–organization fit on organizational attractiveness in the case of well-known organizations. Moreover, we found that awards indirectly affect application decision in the same way. Hence, successful self-selection based on fit is disturbed in this situation. Consequently, the quality of the applicant pool is reduced, resulting in a disadvantage for the well-known recruiting organization. Contrary to expectations, unknown organizations do not appear to be affected by this downside and instead benefit from awards. Our study contributes to the literature in recruiting by focusing on how awards change the impact of other information, while also highlighting potential disadvantages of employer awards. Keywords: Top employer awards; Person–organization fit; Recruitment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eurman:v:38:y:2020:i:1:p:146-156 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2019.06.004 Access Statistics for this article European Management Journal is currently edited by Michael Haenlein More articles in European Management Journal from Elsevier |
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