Linking employer branding orientation and firm performance: Testing a dual mediation route of recruitment efficiency and positive affective climate

Faced with competitive labor markets, firms increasingly use employer branding to build a qualified workforce and engage their employees. However, our understanding of the impact of employer branding orientation on firm performance and the theoretical firm-level mechanisms underlying this potential impact is very limited. To address this gap, we integrate brand marketing theory with human resource management (HRM) research to develop a model explicating how employer branding orientation is linked to firm performance through a dual route by enhancing both recruitment efficiency (i.e., external route: applicants) and positive affective climate (i.e., internal route: incumbent employees). The results of a multisource study (i.e., top management, human resource managers, employees) with 93 firms show employer branding orientation is positively related to firm performance through positive affective climate but not recruitment efficiency. Using a brand equity approach to HRM, our results advance the literature by demonstrating the generalizability of employer branding effects independent of concrete brand attributes and explaining the firm-level mediating mechanisms linking it to firm performance.     

The Third Vote Experiment: Enhancing Policy Representation of a Student Parliament

Since voters are often swayed more by the personal image of politicians than by party manifestos, they may cast votes that are in opposition to their policy preferences. This results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters’ own views. An alternative voting procedure to avoid this type of election failure is prompted by the approach implemented in internet voting advice applications, like the German Wahl-O-Mat, which asks the user a number of questions on topical policy issues; the computer program, drawing on all the parties’ answers, finds for the user the best-matching party, the second-best-matching party, etc. Under the proposed alternative election method, the voters cast no direct votes. Rather, they are asked about their preferences on the policy issues as declared in the party manifestos (Introduce nationwide minimum wage? Yes/No; Introduce a speed limit on the motorways? Yes/No, etc.), which reveals the balance of public opinion on each issue. These embedded referenda measure the degree to which the parties’ policies match the preferences of the electorate. The parliament seats are then distributed among the parties in proportion to their indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented on all the issues) and universality (frequency in representing a majority). This paper reports on an experimental application of this method during the election of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Student Parliament on July 4–8, 2016. The experiment shows that the alternative election method can increase the representativeness of the Student Parliament. We also discuss some traits and bottlenecks of the method that should be taken into account when preparing elections.     

News or Noise? Using Twitter to Identify and Understand Company‐specific News Flow

This study presents a methodology for identifying a broad range of real‐world news events based on microblogging messages. Applying computational linguistics to a unique dataset of more than 400,000 S&P 500 stock‐related Twitter messages, we distinguish between good and bad news and demonstrate that the returns prior to good news events are more pronounced than for bad news events. We show that the stock market impact of news events differs substantially across different categories.     

Tweets and Trades: the Information Content of Stock Microblogs

Microblogging forums (e.g., Twitter) have become a vibrant online platform for exchanging stock‐related information. Using methods from computational linguistics, we analyse roughly 250,000 stock‐related messages (so‐called tweets) on a daily basis. We find an association between tweet sentiment and stock returns, message volume and trading volume, as well as disagreement and volatility. In contrast to previous related research, we also analyse the mechanism leading to an efficient aggregation of information in microblogging forums. Our results demonstrate that users providing above average investment advice are retweeted (i.e., quoted) more often and have more followers, which amplifies their share of voice.     

MULTI‐CRITERIA OPTIMIZATION OF REGIONAL EMPLOYMENT POLICY: A SIMULATION ANALYSIS FOR GERMANY

The distribution of European and national aid among 271 German labor market regions is considered as an optimization problem with three targets: (i) interregional equalization of unemployment rates; (ii) minimization of total (national) unemployment; and (iii) maximization of GDP, subject to budget constraints and some administrative restrictions. The analysis of the German program in 2000–2002 shows that the results actually obtained for 6 billion euro required only 241 million euro under optimal planning (4% of the actual budget). Such an inappropriate implementation of active labor market policies can be the cause of low efficiency, often misinterpreted as uselessness. This paper suggests a decision aid for optimal planning and shows that tax returns from the additional GDP due to jobs subsidized can transform regional policy into a winning governmental strategy.     

An Election Method to Improve Policy Representation of a Parliament

Since voters are often swayed more by the charisma, personal image and communication skills of the individual candidates standing for election than by the parties’ political manifestos, they may cast votes that are actually in opposition to their policy preferences. Such a type of behavior, known as ‘irrational voting’, results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters’ own views. The example of the 2013 German Bundestag shows that the method used to elect it results in inadequate policy representation. The analysis of these elections (see, Tangian, 2016) led to an alternative method which is discussed in this paper. In the alternative method the voters’ policy preferences are taken into account explicitly by means of embedded referenda, testing the matching of the candidates’ policy profiles with that of the electorate. Then the parties are indexed, not with respect to the percentage of votes received but with respect to their representativeness indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented) and universality (frequency in representing a majority), as introduced in the previous paper mentioned. The method is then hypothetically applied to redistribute the Bundestag seats among the party factions, producing a considerable gain in the representativeness of the Bundestag. Finally, we discuss mixed election procedures combining the elements of traditional voting schemes with the proposed method.     

Flexicurity – a European Approach to Labour Market Policy

Although linguistically somewhat strange, “flexicurity”, the combination of labour market flexibility and security for employees, has become a much praised cornerstone of European labour market policies. Obviously, in an environment with rapid technical progress and frequently changing market conditions, employers need to manage their labour force flexibly. In order to achieve this flexibility without creating an unbearable situation for employees, security is the second pillar of the concept. Security refers, however, to “employability” rather than safety from dismissal. As such, the concept looks like an innovative European way of consolidating economic and social interests, although some argue that much flexibility is gained while the security aspect is being neglected. The concept has been successfully adopted in some European countries, notably Denmark and the Netherlands. However, each country has to find its own concept of “flexicurity” using a distinct combination of instruments that fit the national institutional, social and civic context.     

Ethical Leadership Evaluations After Moral Transgression: Social Distance Makes the Difference

In light of continuing corporate scandals, the study of ethical leadership remains an important area of research which helps to understand the antecedents and consequences of ethical behavior in organizations. The present study investigates how social distance influences ethical leadership evaluations, and how in turn ethical leadership evaluations affect leader–member exchange (LMX) after a leader’s moral transgression. Based on construal level theory, we propose that higher social distance will lead to more severe evaluations of immoral behavior and therefore entail lower ethical leadership ratings. More- over, we hypothesize that ethical leadership will positively affect LMX. Participants read a scenario describing a moral situation in which a leader, who was presented in either high or low social distance, behaves unethically toward an employee. We tested our predictions using a structural equation modeling approach. As expected, participants in the high social distance condition judged leaders more harshly (i.e., they gave lower ethical leadership ratings) than in the low social distance condition. Thus, social distance moderated the extent to which leaders are perceived as ethical leaders after moral transgression. Moreover, in accordance with our proposition, ethical leadership ratings had a positive influence on LMX.     

Interview design for revealing preferences of policy makers

A policy maker is asked a few simple questions about his preference. Then the model represents it by a quadratic utility function, which can be made monotonic and quasi-concave (= to provide the convexity of the preference). The design of the interview with a policy maker is aimed at attaining the following goals: (a) no ambiguous output (= degeneration of the model), (b) ordinal approach to preferences (= asking questions about ordinal preferences and providing the uniqueness of the ordinal preference at the model output, regardless of its representation by a quadratic utility function), (c) stability of the model (= the model's input–output transformation is continuous). We also describe briefly the implementation of our model in a user-friendly interface to a corresponding computer program.     

In the eye of the beholder: How regulatory focus and self-efficacy interact in influencing opportunity recognition

Although there is evidence that regulatory focus is associated with opportunity exploitation, there is a lack of research examining its role at the early stages of opportunity recognition. The present study makes two major contributions to address this gap. First, we demonstrate that entrepreneurs' promotion focus is positively related to opportunity recognition, whereas prevention focus is not significantly related to opportunity recognition. Second, integrating two theories of self-regulation – regulatory focus theory and self-efficacy theory – our findings reveal that a high promotion focus compensates for entrepreneurs' low levels of creative and entrepreneurial self-efficacy in opportunity recognition. Our study extends extant cognitive theories of opportunity recognition.