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Small, but attractive: the effect of employer branding and legitimacy on startup attractiveness
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Author: Kilian Moser, TUM School of Management
Author: Andranik Tumasjan, TUM School of Management
Author: Isabell Melanie Welpe, Technical U. Munich
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Startups face competitive disadvantages compared to established firms because they operate under higher levels of risk, uncertainty, and limited public recognition. In this context, one of the biggest challenges is attracting and retaining talented employees. However, theory and empirical research on organizational attractiveness of nascent ventures is very scant. Therefore, the present study combines two theoretical perspectives to understand the formation of organizational attractiveness judgments from the applicants’ view. First, derived from marketing and human resource management theories, we investigate how distinctive employer branding – as an important way of achieving high levels of organizational attractiveness – influences job seekers organizational attractiveness judgments. Second, based on institutional theory, we jointly examine the influence of legitimacy signals on organizational attractiveness. Using a metric conjoint experiment, we study 19,008 job pursuit decisions made by 297 job seekers. Our multi-level analysis using hierarchical linear modeling demonstrates the importance of both employer brand dimensions and legitimacy indicators, and yields significant cross-level interaction effects of entrepreneurial values.
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Search Terms: Employer Branding | Legitimacy | Recruitment
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Knowledge is Prudence: How Entrepreneurs Benefit from Business Training in a Field Experiment
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Author: Jun Huang, Columbia U.
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Can entrepreneurship be learned, and if so, what is most useful for entrepreneurs to learn? These issues have been difficult to address because of the endogeneity of learning and the lack of an empirical strategy to unpack how it affects entrepreneurs. Using data from a field experiment where free entrepreneurship training was randomly distributed, I show that entrepreneurs effectively improved their financial performance by participating in training. To identify the primary mechanism for this effect, I exploit the different predictions of how training affects capital investment. Interestingly, the improvement did not seem to be driven by increased production efficiency, but rather by entrepreneurs learning to refine their business ideas and thus reducing excessive investment. As a result of learning, they invested less in business, hired fewer employees and grew their businesses more slowly, but achieved better performance. This paper contributes a novel strategy for unpacking the benefits of learning, and also provides a demand-side perspective for addressing entrepreneurs' resource constraints.
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Search Terms: Entrepreneurship | Field Experiment | Learning
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Hire someone like me, or someone I need? Entrepreneur identity and early stage hiring in small firms
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Author: Steve Stewart, Georgia Southern U.
Author: Robert C Hoell, Georgia Southern U.
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Recent studies of entrepreneurial hiring have focused on teams of individuals brought together to form new firms. The literature is scarce on the hiring decision made by sole proprietors to obtain early-stage employees in existing growing firms, yet these firms are great in number and significantly impact the U.S. economy. Such hiring decisions will be critical to the growth, and even survival, of such small firms. In this paper, we develop a model which suggests that an entrepreneur’s more central social or role identity influences how they choose to hire early-stage employees. Additionally, we suggest that the job complexity of new employment positions, and the munificence of the human resources in an environment further moderate the relationship between identity and the hiring decision.
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Search Terms: Entrepreneur Identity | Small Business | Hiring
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Why Do Employees Leave Their Firm to Become Entrepreneurs? A Meta-Analytic Review
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Author: Robert P. Garrett, U. of Louisville
Author: Chao Miao, Virginia Commonwealth U.
Author: Shanshan Qian, Towson U.
Author: Tae Jun Bae, Hofstra U.
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There is a lack of consensus regarding the predictors of entrepreneurial spawning. We meta-analyzed 28 studies (with 128 effect sizes) to examine the predictors of entrepreneurial spawning. Our findings indicate that some employee characteristics (age, gender, family background, education, family income, and job position) are positively and significantly associated with entrepreneurial spawning, some parent firm characteristics (firm age, firm performance, firm diversity, and patents) are negatively and significantly related to entrepreneurial spawning, and some environmental characteristics (self-employment and unemployment rate) are positively and significantly related to entrepreneurial spawning. We identified two inverted U-shaped relationships (age and tenure with entrepreneurial spawning).
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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