Who are we? : A quantitative study on the employer brand of Lycksele municipality

Sammanfattning: The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the impact of the factors of attractiveness, organization and reputation on corporate brand identity of Lycksele municipality from the viewpoint of current employees. To achieve this, a conceptual framework and hypotheses were constructed that would allow us to test positive significant effects between factors. In our model, we have examined predicted factors consisting of attractiveness, organization and reputation. We believed that these would have an impact on the employees’ perception of the corporate brand identity, which in turn would influence the predicted outcomes, pride and affective commitment. We discovered knowledge gaps within the field of employer branding, which formed our conceptual model. The reason why we chose to include the stated factors and outcomes in our conceptual framework is because we believed the predicted factors reflect the employees’ personal opinion on their own situation as employees of Lycksele municipality. The outcomes, pride and affective commitment, were chosen because they portray the employees’ personal judgment of the entire workplace. The conceptual model and the hypotheses aided us in answering the research question, which goes as follows: - What kind of effects do the factors of attractiveness, organization and reputation have on the perception of the corporate brand identity within the teaching profession? This thesis was written on commission for Lycksele municipality and used a quantitative approach to conduct a probability sample from the employees in the teaching sector. From the statistical software SPSS, we have performed Cronbach’s alpha test, Pearson Correlation and three regressions that facilitated the testing of our conceptual model. The findings demonstrated that the model was partially supported. Social values of attractiveness, organizational culture and perceived corporate reputation were the factors with direct impact on corporate brand identity. Furthermore, corporate brand identity had a positive significant effect on pride and affective commitment. These results provided empirical evidence that our conceptual framework was valid, as each of the constructs showing significant effects were derived from the three different categories of affecting factors. Besides our theoretical contribution in the research of employer branding, we have detected areas that are in need for improvement and matters that are relevant for Lycksele municipality to modify in order to attract the best candidates.