The Multiple Identities of an Employer

Marcelo Savignano

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Master's Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, grade: 1.0, European School of Ma...

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Master's Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, grade: 1.0, European School of Management and Technology, Berlin, language: English, abstract: This thesis mainly deals with the challenge of analyzing an organization's ability to attract employees. In spite of the abundance of literature covering the subject, there is little empirical evidence supporting the superiority of one method over the other. Such over-supply of organizational theories clearly calls for a unified framework that allows organizations to evaluate and improve their attractiveness as an employer, and as a consequence, this thesis aims to contribute to the field by introducing a Unified Framework for Identity Gap Analysis (UFIGA). The UFIGA draws upon the contributions of three particular theories, which are Employer Branding, the Multiple Facets of Collective Identities and Control Theory, bringing together concepts from typically separated disciplines, such as human resources, marketing, organizational behavior, social psychology, math and engineering. Such a breadth of disciplines allow the model to deal with many aspects of an employer's attractiveness, such as the benefits presented to the target audience (employer branding), the differentiation between projection and perception of these benefits (multiple identities) and the manipulation of certain aspects of the organization's identity as a means of minimizing the gap between projection and perception of benefits (control theory). Besides of formulating a theoretical model for employer attractiveness analysis, this thesis provides the reader with a particular case of the model's applicability. In fact, it applies the UFIGA to the particular case of DHL, a worldwide market leader in the Express and Logistics business, whose identity as an employer is somewhat overshadowed by its strong consumer brand. After collecting information about three particular facets of DHL's identity as an employer (i.e. DHL's manifested, projected and attributed identities), the mismatches between projected and attributed identities are identified. Particular examples of such mismatches can be found in several elements of DHL's employer value proposition, such as work challenge, inspiring colleagues, product reputation and development reputation. Once identified, these gaps are explained in terms of DHL's manifested identity, thus proving the convergence assumptions introduced by the UFIGA. Moreover, the identification and explanation of mismatches allow the author to formulate possible recommendations to minimize those gaps, thus enhancing DHL's attractiveness as an employer.