To serve the studies need, a literature review was done to analyze the important terms. This chapter contains the review of literature on key terms in this research, including corporate culture, vision, human capital developer, brand building behavior and employee-based brand equity. Elements such as brand identity, psychological capital are also reviewed.
Corporate Culture and Brand Identity Definition of Corporate Culture
The English word Culture derives from the word cultura, which means to cultivate. The term culture harbors a vast amount of definitions, but its Latin derivation sums up its deepest meaning to the core albeit all perspective of definitions.
In a general concept, culture is a shared set of attributes within a group or a structured organization. The importance of culture in organizations has a significant, unnoticed influence on the decisions and behaviors of individuals and the whole organization as well (Hartnell, Kinicki, & Ou, 2011; Zwetloot & Leka, 2010).
Matsumoto’s (2000) definition of the word “culture” was described in six general categories: (1) Descriptive, the activities and behavior. (2) Historical, as the heritage and tradition. (3) Normative, as in rules and norms. (4) Psychological descriptions emphasizing learning, problem solving (5) Structural, emphasizing societal structure (6) Genetic, referring to the origin. This analysis of culture was consistent to the intangible aspects of a corporate organizational culture, where coordination flexibility of the structural body depends on the fine balance of all 6 elements. From the viewpoint of a corporate brand, the descriptive category of activity and behavior simulates the human interaction of business execution; the
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“historical” category refers to the company history and brand tradition, which affects the continuous corporate culture. “Normative”, explains policies and regulation of the company system, and “Structural” as in a company’s hierarchy. “Genetics” refers to the DNA of the corporate member’s heritage of brand identity. The “psychology”
category is the most complex and intangible part of the employee member’s psyche, yet it is also the richest part in culture worth investigating.
In Cottam and De Chernatony’s (2008) findings, given the link between culture and employee behavior and the criticality of employee behavior in service brands, organizational culture, which is examined as consistent, was perceived by managers and staff as being key to brand success. Corporate culture or organizational culture is a set of shared values (Zwetloot & Leka, 2012). Culture is cyclical and dynamic in its own nature, as Matsumoto (2000) stated, culture helps to reinforce, promulgate, and strengthen the behavioral similarities and differences that produce it in the first place, producing a cycle of reciprocity between actual behaviors and our theoretical understanding. It is a formation of a standard of behavior based on a set of beliefs, influencing an individual that is engaged to know of a certain way to interact in the shortest time span. Organizational culture is a set of values that binds the organization, holistic, historically determined, socially constructed, and involves beliefs and behavior, that exists at a variety of levels, and manifests itself in a wide range of features of organizational life (Cottam & De Chernatony, 2008; Deteit, Schioedei, &
Mauriel, 2000). Organization core values are vital for continuity, consistency and credibility in a value-creating process, core values are overarching concepts that summarize the identity of the corporate brand, and are guiding lights for the brand building process (Urde, 2003). Shared values are a main element of corporate culture corporate identity and cohesion since linked with ethics and corporate social responsibility (Zwetloot & Leka, 2010).
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Figure 2.1. McKinsey’s 7S model. Adapted from “Occupational Health Psychology,”
( p.251) by Zwetsloot, G. and Leka, S. 2010. Copyright 2010 by the Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
In the business setting, explicit core values are recognized as main determinants of organization identities. The McKinsey’s model (see also figure 2.1) illustrates that shared values are underlying company strategy, structure, and systems; the hard side of business, but also skills, staff, and style; the soft side of business (Zwetloot & Leka, 2010). Enlargement of the soft side of business, means the dissection and amplification of culture components in terms of company skills, staff and style, which correlates to the psychological aspect in Matsumoto’s equation. Organizational culture is an important characteristic that influences organization, group, and even individual behavior (Hartnell, Kinicki, & Ou, 2011). One way of embedding culture is to have key values that are widely understood and respected within an organization. These need to be communicated regularly and employed by all the employees so that they become embodied in creative action (Wilson, 2005).
shared value
Structure
system
style
staff skill
strategy
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A strong culture has a positive effect on performance, by facilitating goal alignment, leading high levels of employee motivation. Both a strong culture from the viewpoint of “consistency” and an appropriate culture from the standpoint of content will produce positive results (Cottam & De Chernatomy, 2008). The corporate brand personality strongly influences the organization culture throughout each and every one of the employees, necessary in existence for a healthy corporation. In the past Aaker (1995) examined 60 US products and defined the basic brand personality attributes: (1) sincerity, (2) excitement, (3) competence, (4) sophistication, (5) ruggedness. This model later became the foundation of an evolution of the personality trait model. Keller and Richey (2006) based their research from Aaker's model and defined another corporate brand personality trait model. Corporate brand personality reflects the value, words and actions of employees, individually and collectively (Keller & Richey, 2006). Unlike brand personality which reflected the purchasing behavior of customers as an express of their actual or ideal self-image. Corporate brand personality revolves on the core of the employee perceived corporate brand image, which is relevant to brand identity.
Brand Identity
Explicit core values of organizations are recognized as main determinants of the organization’s identity (Zwetloot & Leka, 2010). The social identity theory states one’s self concept is derived from a perceived membership in a relevant social group.
Brand personality is a set of human characteristic associated with the brand (Aaker, 1997), sometimes representing the organization culture. Seen in literature was the intimate relationship of organizational culture and employee identity. Organization culture can bring out the brand personality in forms such as human communication, interaction, marketing, advertising and customer relations. De Chematony (1999) suggests that stronger brands result from a homogeneous brand identity, with
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contingent identity components
.
An individual’s brand identity in the organization is the reflection of the corporate brand personality. The sense of self is a strong core, possessing the richness of thoughts, ideas and beliefs, as an employee enters a corporate brand, the corporate brand personality becomes a part of this “self”.Corporate identity is the self-presentation of a company that consists of the cues offered by an organization through its behavior, communication and symbols. These signals are received by various groups, internally and externally, and are formed into perceptions and attitudes constituting an image of the company (Demetriou, Papasolomou, & Vrontis, 2010). Furthermore, employees must effectively internalize the desired image before they can project it to others (Miles & Mangold, 2004).
Vision
Vision is a projected image of what a leader wants to achieve, an image of the future based on general, long-term goals, thus vision is motivational, and is measured by growth, aspiration and imagery (Baum & Locke, 2004). Vision is defined by the oxford dictionary as an ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom. An effective process of understanding the organization’s vision, enables employee commitment for action, and emphasizes the alignment across various statements of the organization’s mission, goals, values, and policies (Srinivasan, 2014).
Imagination is the inspiration of a pre-planned long term goal, the insight leadership direction, which is in essence also correlated to the fundamentals of the initial establishment concepts of the company. The importance of vision as a motivation of the brand is recognized when more than 50% of new ventures are terminating within five years (Baum & Locke, 2004). Gluck (1981) has stated that the prospects of
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success for a business or enterprise are more often limited by the lack of creative insight and new option generation than the scarcity of capital and other resources.
Therefore the existence of a vision is very important and crucial to a company brand’s lifeline. Strategic management is visionary management, concerned with creating and conceptualizing ideas of where the organization is going, and empirical management decides how to get there (Wilson, 2005). Vision is not only a goal but should be frequently communicated, and understood by employees to increase efficiency.
Communicated vision may help align entrepreneur-employee goals. Not only does vision have positive effects on organization performance, the communication of vision is as important as vision content alone for motivating high venture growth (Baum &
Locke, 2004).
The power of shared vision was stated in a research on high performing companies of the Singapore National Productivity Award in methods: (Wilson, 2005)
“…… similarities in their approaches include, introducing management practices designed to develop self-motivated workers who took pride in their work, transfer authority for both tasks and responsibility down the hierarchy to give a sense of ownership, regular discussion between managers and employees about performance growth and development. ” (p.160)
And in different external environment situations, vision sometimes requires change. It need not always be the CEO of the organization, who is the sponsor of the change. Srinivan (2014) had stated vision as the person/unit/representative in the organization who has felt the need for change/new direction and is driving the initiative.
And at Forbes, it was the HR Director. In many companies a fatal flaw is that strategic planning and operational decision making cannot be forged because one or another of two critical factors - vision and leadership - is missing (Gluck, 1981). Visionary
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leadership is the key driver to integrate the motives and facilitators of global companies (Akkrawinut & Ussahawanitchalit, 2011).
Innovation was encouraged in a growing corporate brand for the sake of evolution. When organizations as a whole try to promote risk taking, concepts of
“organizational innovation” take focus, in innovative organizations there is often a push for constant, continuous improvement and institutionalized belief that “we can always do better” (Detert, Schroeder, & Mauriel, 2000). This is also the whole meaning of vision.
Employee Brand Building Behavior
Psychological capital.
The psychological contract is the perception of employer and employee parties in the employment relationship, the organization has expectations, the individual similarly has a vision of the results or rewards expected which will satisfy one’s needs in return for the energy spent (Wilson, 2005). The researcher believes that the human psychological aspect effects the out bringing of behavior in regard of organization behavior dynamics. Beliefs about what motivates humans are fundamental to the study of organization behavior (Detert, Schroeder, & Mauriel, 2000). People make the difference, and therefore it is important to focus on people’s self-belief (Bakker & Derks, 2011). After recruitment, what people bring into the company becomes a net asset value of the company. Brand building was based on the employee individual level of existing solid foundation of psychological capital which can also be influenced by the corporate culture. Therefore it is of great importance that human capital developers understand and cultivate the employee psychological capital. The extent to how much influence the human capital developer affects an employee’s psychological capital was unknown in current literature, which was also a research objective of this paper. But prior research had found, the more
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higher the employee psychological capital, the better are the employee performance outcomes. Psychological capital (PsyCap) has a positive relationship with both employee performance and job satisfaction. Moreover, in a business environment where innovation has becoming a competency, PsyCap predicted creative employee performance over and above each of the four PsyCap components (hope, optimism, resilience, and efficacy) (Avey, Luthans, Luthans, & Sweetman, 2010).
PsyCap was seen as a mindset initiator for positive organizational behavior, which focuses on the positive emotional factors of the human psychological components, concerning “strength “rather than negative components such as
“weakness” that invokes negative organizational behavior, organizational cynicism (Avey, Luthans, & Youssef, 2010), intentional turnover or sometimes even dysfunctional behavior. Research on positive emotions using this framework has suggested that individuals and groups of people operate at more optimal levels of cognitive and emotional functioning when reporting higher levels of positive emotions (Fredrickson & Losada, 2005). On personal individual level, one’s psychological capital is a power house that can fuel and boost growth and performance. At the organizational level, similar to human and social capital, psychological capital may provide leverage, return on investment, and competitive advantage through improved employee performance (Luthan, et al, 2005).
Psychological capital is not as transient and momentary as the more extreme states such as moods or emotions, but was more of a long-term attitude. For example, unlike emotions, whose at-the-moment meaning and intensity may be constructed through subjectively negotiated appraisal processes for more effective coping (Luthans, Avolio, Walumbwa, & Li, 2010). PsyCap was a more stable measurement of the long term capacity of one’s psychological state. This asset measurement was stated by Luthans et al., (2010) to bring out measurable success
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The full illustration of PsyCap is: (Luthans et al., 2007)
“An individual’s positive psychological state of development that is characterized by: (1) having confidence (self-efficacy) to take on and put in the necessary effort to succeed at challenging tasks; (2) making a positive attribution (optimism) about succeeding now and in the future;
(3) persevering toward goals and, when necessary, redirecting paths to goals (hope) in order to succeed; and (4) when beset by problems and adversity, sustaining and bouncing back and even beyond (resilience) to attain success.”(p.3)
Efficacy is the ability or power to produce a desired result or effect. Based on Bandura’s social cognitive theory, efficacy is usually domain-specific and can be developed for a specific set of tasks through mastery experiences, modeling, social persuasion, and physiological and psychological arousal (Bandura, 1997; Avey, Luthans, & Yousef, 2010). With the arousal of keen competitive business rivalry, it is vital for companies to possess awareness for the look out of creative employee talents. Thus it is mentioned in research of the effectiveness of Efficacy, higher levels of efficacy are associated with increased creative performance (Amabile, 1996).
Resiliency is the capacity to rebound or bounce back from adversity, conflict, failure, or even positive events, progress, and increased responsibility (Luthans, 2002). It is also stated that Individuals who are resilient show more emotional stability when faced with adversity (Luthans, Vogelgasang, & Lester, 2006) are more flexible to changing demands, and are open to new experiences (Tugade &
Fredrickson, 2004). In Baum and Locke’s (2004) research finding, tenacity, which was similar to resilience, was significantly related to new resource skills.
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In the midst of a highly competitive rapidly changing business era, employee’s ability to confront environmental risk, uncertainty and change leads to the increment of the human capitals sum of value.
To conclude this section, relevant research findings have established the fact that psychological capital is positively related to employee performance, satisfaction, and commitment. And that physiologically, behavior is a result of the psychological state.
Employee brand building behavior.
There will always be that discrepancy between culture and behavior (Matsumoto, 2000). The degree of discrepancy often differs according to dynamic tension, extremes such as employee turnover or damageable behavior towards the brand image. Therefore enhancing the basic Positive organizational behavior in a corporate personality trait is the foundation of further up-building of the brand structure. Positive organization behavior (POB) is “the study and application of positively oriented human resource strengths and psychological capacities that can be measured, developed, and effectively managed for performance improvement (Avey, Luthans, & Jenson, 2009).”
Employee behavior is the often-underestimated success factor in brand-building (Burmann & Zeplin, 2005). In Burmann and Zeplin’s (2005) research, for the purpose of better understanding the development and functioning of brands, they approached the study from the perspective of human psychology research to brand management.
Results showed that employee brand commitment explains the psychological processes that lead employees to display brand citizen behavior, manifesting the organization culture that has already been immersed into the employee’s own identity, which brings forth brand building behavior. Kapferer stated, “In terms of brand management, identity precedes image.” Burmann and Zeplin explains the relationship as below:
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“While brand image is on the receiver’s side —it describes how external target groups perceive the brand — brand identity is on the sender’s side. It can be defined as those sustainable cross-spatiotemporal attributes that determine the essence and character of a brand from the internal perspective.”
Once identity is inked in, is the prism that goes beyond image, turning the internal employee into a faithful follower and projector of the brand vision. Highly regarded Brand image can also enhance stakeholder or customer’s brand identity or brand identity. According to social identity theory, as long as the brand identity is etched as an individual’s own identity, awareness and loyalty to the mother brand is a reflex, stimulating brand-building behavior unconsciously. Employees can reinforce, strengthen and create a brand image for their product and organization. Employee brand behaviors may include courtesy, responsiveness reliability, helpfulness, empathy among others (Miles & Mangold, 2004).
King and Grace (2008) termed “Brand Citizen Behavior” and “Positive Word of Mouth (WOM),” as a set of behavior criteria necessary to measure the brand equity, containing the following criteria:
1. Taking responsibility for tasks outside of own area.
2. Demonstrating brand personality-consistent behaviors.
3. Consider impact on brand before acting.
4. Interested to learn more about brand.
5. Positive employee word-of-mouth: recommend to others.
6. Positive employee word-of-mouth: talk positively about.
7. Employee involvement: participate in development of customer initiative.
8. Involve in organizational initiatives.
9. Provide feedback about organizational activities.
The Cornell University Industrial and Labor Relations school article “Making
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Human Capital the Creative Core of Strategy Execution” discussed the benefits of developing the human capital such as: “Closing knowledge gaps and sharing expertise across the enterprise produces new ideas, shortens response cycles and increases organizational capabilities.” The article points out strategies for human capital developers such as increasing organization learning agility and employee innovation capabilities. In other words, employee brand building behavior would be, offering and contributing innovative ideas and motivating one another towards fast-pace learning and knowledge exchange. Furthermore, from the resource-based view of the firm, the knowledge, including cognition, held by human capital has been demonstrated to have strong positive effect on firm performance (Burton-jones
& Spencer, 2011).
In order to enhance brand-building behaviors, the internalization of the brand image, received, ruminated and displayed is first the concern. The internalization of the desired brand image occurs best when employees feel a high level of trust in the organization for which they work. The fulfillment of employees’ psychological contracts with the organization is critical to the process of developing high levels of employee trust (Miles & Mangold, 2004).
Internal branding.
Internal branding is the direction the employer provides to influence employee attitudes and behaviors so that they reflect organizational requirements and successfully carry out roles and responsibilities, and starts with the process of transferring brand-related information to the employee (King & Grace, 2010).
The “Employer Brand” was described by Ambler and Barrow (1996) as the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment and identified with the employing company. While Employer branding means “the sum of a company’s effort to communicate to existing and prospective staff that it is a
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desirable place to work” (Lloyd, 2002) Employer branding is seen principally as a recruiting tool for organizations (Robertson & Khatibi, 2013). In other words, Employer branding is the conveying of the Employer’s status value. As quoted by Robertson & Khatibi (2013):
“The employer brand has the ability to develop a brand image and personality which contribute to the organization identity. This shapes the employee’s personally perceived image and in turn, influences their satisfaction and
“The employer brand has the ability to develop a brand image and personality which contribute to the organization identity. This shapes the employee’s personally perceived image and in turn, influences their satisfaction and