Conjoint implications on job preferences: the moderating role of involvement

Abstract

Attracting qualified staff is pivotal for organizational competitive advantages. However, little is known about which employer characteristics mainly drive job choice, or about how applicants evaluate certain organizational characteristics. Moreover, recent recruitment research hints that the influential weight of organizational characteristics on job choice may be contingent upon applicants' involvement. By using conjoint analysis, we test the impact of different organizational and job characteristics as well as the moderating role of involvement. The results suggest that involvement increases soft factors, while decreasing the effect of payment on job choice.

Effect of Work-Family Balance Policy on Job Selection and Social Sustainability: The Case of South Korea

“…Here, a respondent could express his/her preference by choosing the preferred alternative among hypothetical companies in which various combinations of the five attributes were suggested, with all other attributes being equal. Annual salary, weekly working hours, and firm size have been found to be important workplace attributes [29][30][31][32]. Additionally, the present study added the availability of parental leave and a workplace childcare center to the attributes to discern the effect of WFB policies.…”

“…Baum and Kabst conducted a choice experiment on 130 German college and graduate students and took into account the following company attributes: work climate, security, flexible working hours availability, working schedule, training, salary, person-organization fit, promotion prospects, task attractiveness, and location [29]. Tumasjan and colleagues conducted a choice experiment about finding a job in a start-up company on 160 German college students and set the attributes of the start-up business as follows: flexibility of working, hierarchy, team climate, stock option, responsibility, task variety, leadership functions, learning curve, and entrepreneurial knowledge building [30].…”

Employer brand management as boundary‐work: a grounded theory analysis of employer brand managers' narrative accounts

“…Attracting and retaining qualified staff as key tasks of HRM in post‐industrialised working environments (Orlitzky, ) have gained importance due to an increasingly tight labour market for (high‐)qualified workers (Dögl and Holtbrügge, ). Recruitment strategies of organisations have become more competitive (Baum and Kabst, ) and diverse (Parry and Thyson, ), also in reaction to changes in employees' expectations of attractive employers (Broadbridge et al ., ). As a result of these societal and economic frameworks, employer branding, which aims at creating a unique value proposition to potential and existing employees (Martin et al ., ), has become a vital management task (Bratton and Gold, ).…”

Guilt, Gender, and Work-Life Balance in Japan

“…For most individuals, a good balance between life and work depends on the interaction of multiple factors related to the job and work environment (Baum and Kabst 2013). The traditional way of understanding preferences in this context is by means of the hedonic wage model in which market data on wages are related to job characteristics (Rosen (1974); Sakai (2014)).…”

“…Outside this literature, the number of studies is very limited and largely uses university students or labor market entrants as subjects. Baum and Kabst (2013), for example, capture the preferences of graduate job seekers by conducting a choice experiment using graduate and undergraduate students in a German university, using the ten highest ranked job choice factors as attributes in experiments (with all non-wage attributes having two levels.) 3 Two other more recent studies worth mentioning include Mas and Pallais (2017) and Wiswall and Zafar (2018).…”