Competencies: Alternative frameworks for competitive advantage

Competencies in organizations can be broadly classified as employee-level and organizational-level. Since organizational-level competencies are embedded in employee-level competencies, the identification of the latter is important for organizations interested in using competencies to achieve competitive advantage. In this paper, we present a model of employee competencies as a means to organizational competitiveness and discuss various frameworks for identifying employee competencies. In addition to the traditional frameworks, which are more suitable for organizations functioning in a static environment, we offer two alternative frameworks that can be useful in identifying competencies in a dynamic organizational environment. Once appropriate employee-level competencies are identified, a competency-based human resource system can be implemented to ensure that employees actually do possess the identified competencies.     

Managing employee attention and internal branding

We extend the marketing literature on internal branding by developing a theoretical framework to explain the processes whereby brand orientation affects in- and extra-role employee brand-building behavior from the theoretical perspective of the attention-based view. The results of a survey of 314 UK-based nonprofit organizations show that brand orientation leads to the development of internal branding mechanisms, which in turn fosters in-role employee brand-building behaviors. We also find that internal branding mechanisms mediate the effects of brand orientation on extra-role employee brand-building behavior, as there exists an inverted U-shaped relationship between internal branding mechanisms and extra-role employee brand-building behaviors. Furthermore, our result shows that the inverted U-shaped relationship between internal branding mechanisms and extra-role employee brand-building behaviors flips to a concave upward curve when strong interfunctional communications exist.     

为何中国员工偏好沉默——威权领导对员工建言的消极影响

采用问卷调查方式收集了66名领导与其286名下属的配对样本,运用层级回归的方法,探讨了威权领导对员工建言的影响及其作用机制。结果表明,威权领导和员工权力距离都对员工建言存在显著的负向预测效应。另外,员工权力距离还会调节威权领导对员工建言的效应,当员工权力距离较高时,威权领导与员工建言间的关系较弱。最后,员工心理授权部分中介威权领导、员工权力距离对员工建言的影响,完全中介威权领导和员工权力距离的交互项对员工建言的影响。这些研究结果有助于理解中国传统领导行为对员工建言的影响以及影响的中介机制和边界条件,具有重要的理论意义和实践意义。     

Social Alliance and Employee Voluntary Activities: A Resource-Based Perspective

The corporate social responsibility literature devotes relatively little attention to the strategic role played by employee voluntary activities (EVAs) in social alliances. Using the resource-based perspective of the organization to frame the data collection and the analyses, this article investigates: (1) the role of EVAs in the development of corporate and non-profit organizations (NPOs) competitive assets and (2) the management approaches to how both parties can develop their own resources by combining them with the shared resources with the purpose of enhancing its competitive advantage in its own sector. The database is composed of 70 specifically designed interviews with managers of UK-based firms and NPOs. The analyses suggest, among other things, that the majority of corporate and non-profit managers find that EVAs generate substantial tangible and intangible benefits for their respective organisations, creating genuine synergies. We also find evidence of a general preference for the management approaches of such programmes in both types of organisation.     

Building trust: How leaders can engender feelings of trust among followers

Trust has long been recognized across cultures, industries, and organizations as a key component of social exchange. Yet in many communities and organizations throughout the world, there is a growing trust deficit. In this article, we explore what leaders can do to generate trust among the individuals within their organizations to help facilitate better relationships and positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations. More specifically, we present a qualitative study in which semistructured interviews with employees at an assisted-living care facility highlight two ways that leaders can build trust within their organizations: (1) by demonstrating humility in their communication and (2) by exhibiting compassion in their behavior. We further highlight two characteristics, authenticity and proactivity, that can help leaders increase the effectiveness of these actions. By making these behaviors part of how they lead, leaders and managers can more successfully generate feelings of trust among the individuals within their organizations and help their organizations to maintain and strengthen their competitive advantage.     

Emotional labour and surplus value: the case of holiday ‘reps’

Service organizations are encouraged by the literature [Grönroos, 1996, 1997; 2000; Zeithaml and Bitner, 2000] to consider the manner in which employees perform at the customer/front-line employee interface, as a means to gain competitive advantage. The employee's behaviour requires ‘emotional labour’ [Hochschild, 1983] where the front-line employee has to either conceal or manage actual feelings for the benefit of a successful service delivery. The implication is not necessarily of equality or mutual benefit but of satisfaction for the customer and profit for the management. The article discusses whether the service employee is being exploited in this three-way relationship, and how surplus value accrues and its benefit distributed. Expecting emotional labour from employees can be exploitative, thus increasing the risk of potential deceit, in particular where poor recruitment, training and support recovery accompany the expectations of the emotional labourer. To illustrate this argument, data gathered from in-depth interviews with three holiday ‘reps’ are used.     

The corporate social responsibility (CSR) employer brand process: integrative review and comprehensive model

ABSTRACT

Firms are increasingly drawing on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in their employer branding to improve attractiveness and engage current and potential employees, and to ensure consistency in employee brand behaviours. However, there is a dearth of literature synthesising CSR and employer branding research to understand employee engagement with CSR-firms from a branding perspective. In this article, the authors carried out an integrative literature review of CSR and employer branding literatures. Informed by signaling theory, the authors develop a conceptual model of the CSR employer branding process as a cohesive view from the potential and current employee perspective. Our review highlights the need for firms to achieve CSR consistency in terms of (a) embeddedness of CSR values, and (b) levels of internal CSR. These two factors frame a typology that enable managers to better execute their CSR employer brand identity to achieve favourable results, such as a high-quality talent pool and positive affective, cognitive and behavioural employee outcomes.     

A Conceptualization of the Employee Branding Process

SUMMARY

We propose a conceptual model of the employee branding process in which the employee brand image is driven by the messages employees receive and the mechanisms within employees' psyches that enable them to make sense of those messages. The model identifies various sources through which messages are delivered and describes the contributions of those sources to the employee branding process. The psychological contract is identified as a perceptual mechanism central to the employee branding process. The model specifies the consequences of the employee branding process and describes a feedback loop through which managers can monitor the process.     

Internal brand orientation: conceptualisation,scale development and validation

Internal branding is increasingly acknowledged as a potential route to acquiring sustainable competitive advantage. However, to date no systematic attempt has been made to operationalise from an organisational perspective all imperatives for achieving brand internalisation. To address this omission, we introduce internal brand orientation as a new construct that provides a measurable and more succinct picture of internal branding. Following the literature in measurement theory, we report a series of complementary studies and develop a scale which comprises two dimensions: top management brand commitment and shared brand values. The new scale demonstrates strong psychometric evidence of reliability and validity, facilitating future research in the area. Findings can be used as a guidance by business executives in their effort to turn employees into brand ambassadors and motivate everyone in the organisation towards brand supportive behaviours.     

Mindfulness as a strategy for sustainable competitive advantage

This conceptual article explores how mindfulness can be successfully integrated in the strategy tool kit of organizations. The likely global reconstruction in the aftermath of COVID-19 can be effective if organizations reexamine their existing philosophies and business practices. Against this backdrop, mindfulness is a time-tested practice that has the potential to transcend all functions in a company’s value chain and to create a sustainable competitive advantage. This article uses a strategy lens to examine mindfulness in organizations, which has implications for researchers and practitioners. First, I discuss the theoretical frameworks of mindfulness, the performance improvements that individuals can expect from consistent practice, and how these improvements translate to organization-level performance. Next, I summarize the methods and tools for workplace application and the steps for implementing mindfulness strategies in organizations. Finally, I describe implementation challenges and offer assessment tools for mindfulness.     

The new WTP: Willingness to participate

A key concept underlying competitive strategy is that of WTP, representing the consumer's ‘willingness to pay’ a premium price for goods or services. Through branding and other efforts, companies strive to push their message out and create a high willingness to pay, whereby consumers feel there are few or no substitutes for what these companies are selling. Social media, however, are making push-based marketing anachronistic. Users of social media typically eschew professional communications forced on them by faceless and impersonal organizations, in favor of more personal conversations. These individuals seek greater engagement with their preferred brands, and involvement—with or without the company's approval—in creating brand personalities. Their affinity for these preferred brands might well auger the dawn of a new WTP: willingness to participate. This article presents a model of consumer engagement through social media, and argues for re-conceptualizing WTP by utilizing a series of examples which show how companies that engage consumers via social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) stand to reap the benefits of long-term competitive advantages.     

Understanding retail branding: conceptual insights and research priorities

With the growing realization that brands are one of a firm's most valuable intangible assets, branding has emerged as a top management priority in the last decade. Given its highly competitive nature, branding can be especially important in the retailing industry to influence customer perceptions and drive store choice and loyalty. We integrate lessons from branding and retail image research to provide a better understanding of how retailers create their brand images, paying special attention to the role of the manufacturer and private label brand assortment. We also highlight some important areas that deserve further research in the form of three sets of research priorities.     

A great place to work!? Understanding crowdsourced employer branding

The benefits provided by employment and identified with a specific employing company are referred to as employer branding. We argue that when employees use IT to share and access work-related experiences openly across organizations, their expectations and assessments of workplaces change. We collected 38,000 reviews of the highest and lowest ranked employers on Glassdoor, an online crowdsourced employer branding platform. Using IBM Watson to analyze the data, we identify seven employer branding value propositions that current, former, and potential employees care about when they collectively evaluate employers. These propositions include (1) social elements of work, (2) interesting and challenging work tasks, (3) the extent to which skills can be applied in meaningful ways, (4) opportunities for professional development, (5) economic issues tied to compensation, (6) the role of management, and (7) work/life balance. We clarify that these value propositions do not all matter to the same extent and demonstrate how their relative valences and weights differ across organizations, especially if institutions are considered particularly good or bad places to work. Based on these findings, we show how employers can use crowdsourced employer branding intelligence to become great places to work that attract highly qualified employees.     

Leakage,entrepreneurship, and satisfaction in hospitality

Tourism is a very important tool for economic development. However, its economic effects are mainly conditioned by the level of leakage. This work defines leakage, provides an original evaluation of the entrepreneurial environment in showing that it is the one with the lowest level of leakage, and creates a new framework. It also measures leakage in an innovative way using a quantitative approach. In addition, the paper explores and shows how leakage can affect critical business factors, such as customer and employee satisfaction. The empirical study uses structural equations and data from hotels in the Valencian Region (Spain) to show how important leakage is in making businesses more competitive. The results confirm the new model and are of interest for company managers and public organizations.     

Organizational culture as differentiator in international retailing

Much of the international retailing literature echoes major retailers' assertions that inimitable organizational cultures can create competitive advantage. However, the culture concept remains ill-defined and systematic international empirical analysis is lacking. Based on website analyses of nine international retailers, the paper investigates how organizations define their cultures, codify and transfer them into practice, and aim to homogenize them across borders. Although some evidence for organization-specific cultural aspirations is identified, findings suggest that retailers' cultures become homogenized within and between countries. This supports previous work on the existence of industry-specific macro cultures and challenges the resource-based view, which sees culture as a source of competitive advantage.     

Does green brand anthropomorphism influence repurchase intention? Understanding the impact of brand warmth,psychological ownership,and self-brand congruity

As consumers become more conscious of the deteriorating state of the environment, organizations too are beginning to demonstrate their sustainable commitments in ‘green’ branding through anthropomorphism. Extant literature has not been able to holistically cover this phenomenon, especially in terms of its importance in facilitating repurchase intention. Based on this lacuna, we explore how green anthropomorphic branding can influence consumers' brand warmth and psychological ownership, which in turn, could lead to repurchase intention. We explore the impact of ‘green self-congruity’ and its influence on this relationship. By illustrating the significance of constructs such as green brand anthropomorphism, psychological ownership, brand warmth, and self-congruity in facilitating repurchase intention. We apply the notion of self-congruity and enhance the literature on green anthropomorphic brands. This research provides guidelines to brand managers of green retail, to design strategies that focus on green anthropomorphic branding, facilitating consumers' repurchase intention.     

A compassion-centric behavioral agency perspective for organizations in times of crisis

In times of crisis, organizations face a dilemma: How should they balance between minimizing losses and surviving financially, and acting for the benefit of all stakeholders and of society at large? In theory, managers should balance between multiple demands, forgoing short-term profits to address human needs when necessary. But in practice, managers may face challenges in balancing demands during a crisis. Combining the stakeholder-agency and compassion perspectives in the context of crisis management, we present the compassion-centric behavioral agency in crisis (CCBAC) framework to address this theory-practice gap. We suggest three levers for organizations and policymakers to encourage this behavior from organizations: developing and using technological and innovation capabilities, paradoxical leadership behaviors, and employee well-being and generosity programs. Organizations benefit from the CCBAC framework because they become better positioned to maintain their long-term competitive advantage and positive organizational identity while contributing to the needs of society. Policymakers benefit from incentivizing such organizations because they serve as an intermediary to achieve outcomes for society at large. Throughout this article, we use the COVID-19 pandemic, responses to mass shootings, and other example crises to highlight the tension and opportunity within our “both/and” approach. We conclude that organizations can be compassionate even as they pursue profit and efficiency in the long run.     

A shift in perspective? The role of emotional branding in shaping born globals’ performance

Branding strategies have been at the core of marketing and strategy literatures for decades. Global brands are known for their positive influence in increasing customer trust and confidence, thus reducing the risks associated with foreign operations from the firms’ standpoint. These positive effects of global brands have led to research exploring brand image while emphasizing its relevance in positioning, gaining competitive advantage, and facilitating firms’ international business. Born-global firms (BGs) can mostly benefit from harnessing brand image, mainly by reducing market-related uncertainties while establishing a brand-based reputation and thus enhance their international expansion. However, very few attempts have been made to investigate the role of branding in advancing BG performance. Through a survey-based study including 147 Israeli BGs, complemented by 11 in-depth interviews with BG managers, we investigated the distinct role of functional and emotional brand-image aspects. The findings demonstrate that emotional branding bears a significant impact on BG performance. This impact reaches beyond the influence of innovativeness and marketing intelligence on BG performance. Surprisingly, while functional branding was enhanced by firms’ innovativeness, it showed no significant impact on international performance.     

Brand Reality: The Japanese Perspective

This study of the Japanese perspective on brand reality draws on personal interviews in Japanese organizations and published writings on branding in Japan. It first details the various factors which make brand reality such a natural and powerful element of the successful Japanese organizations. The study then discusses how brand reality is created by Japanese firms. It ends with the current efforts of the Japanese organizations to manage and control their future brand identity.     

Political branding: sense of identity or identity crisis? An investigation of the transfer potential of the brand identity prism to the UK Conservative Party

Abstract

Brands are strategic assets and key to achieving a competitive advantage. Brands can be seen as a heuristic device, encapsulating a series of values that enable the consumer to make quick and efficient choices. More recently, the notion of a political brand and the rhetoric of branding have been widely adopted by many political parties as they seek to differentiate themselves, and this has led to an emerging interest in the idea of the political brand. Therefore, this paper examines the UK Conservative Party brand under David Cameron’s leadership and examines the applicability of Kapferer’s brand identity prism to political branding. This paper extends and operationalises the brand identity prism into a ‘political brand identity network’ which identifies the inter-relatedness of the components of the corporate political brand and the candidate political brand. Crucial for practitioners, this model can demonstrate how the brand is presented and communicated to the electorate and serves as a useful mechanism to identify consistency within the corporate and candidate political brands.