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RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Research methodology has been discussed in this chapter. An academic research consists of
three main interdependent elements that together form “the triad network of justification.
They are aims, research objectives & methods (Laudan, 1984, p.63). The chapter will explain
all the points.
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2. To find out whether organisation culture is one of the important dimension of
perspective
4. To find out the significance of communication strategy from potential employers and
5. To find out whether prospective employees with a particular personality type have
6. To find out whether prospective employees with a particular personality type have
7. To find out whether prospective employees with a particular personality type have
8. To find out whether prospective employee with a particular personality type have
9. To find out whether prospective employees with a particular personality type have
10. To find out is there any significant impact of gender on importance given to employer
brand factors.
11. To find out is there any impact of preference for a particular sector in importance
12. To find out is there any significant impact of gender on preference for a particular
sector.
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13. To find out is there any significant impact of gender on preference for a particular
industry
14. To find out is there any significant impact of gender on preference given to employer
brand factors
15. To find out is there any significant difference in the importance given to
employers.
Following the objectives of the present study, the researcher formulated the following
research questions.
employer brand from employers and employees perspective for developing employer
brand framework?
employer brand from employers and employees perspective for developing employer
brand framework?
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6. Do prospective employees with a particular personality type have preference for
particular sector?
specific industry?
10. Do prospective employees with a particular personality type have preference for
11. Is there any impact of preference for a particular sector in importance given to
12. Is there any significant impact of gender on preference for a particular sector?
13. Is there any significant impact of gender on preference for a particular industry?
14. Is there any significant impact of gender in importance given to employer brand
factors?
15. Is there any significant difference in the importance given to communication strategy
On the basis of the above-mentioned objectives and the research question of the present
3.4 Hypotheses:
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H2 Organisational reputation of the organisation is one of the important dimension of
perspective.
H6 Prospective employees with a particular personality type have preference for a particular
sector
H7 Prospective employees with a particular personality type have preference for a specific
industry
H8 Prospective employees with a particular personality type have preference for particular
H9 Prospective employees with a particular personality type have preference for particular
communication strategy.
H10 Prospective employees with a particular personality type have preference for particular
media of communication.
factors.
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H12 There is no significant impact of preference for a particular sector on importance
Research is a synthesis of multiple perspectives which can be used to define research goals to
choose relevant questions, methodology, methods, analysis and to interpret results (Crossan,
2003). Data has been collected for this research from multiple perspectives with the help of a
cross sectional, non-experimental mixed method research design. Data was collected using
sequential mixed-method approach where exploratory qualitative data analysis was followed
by a conclusive quantitative approach one of the purpose of using a mixed method design is
to demonstrate triangulation (Greene et al., 1989) which involves combining methodologies
to study the same social phenomenon (Denzin, 1978, p.291) so that the weakness of one
method is overcome by the strengths of another method (Jick, 1979). Denzin (1978, p.302) as
the “between (or across) method” type of helps in cross validation of results and in
crosschecking for internal consistency a reliability (Jick, 1979).
A single case non-experimental filed survey method of research design was followed for the
entire study where each and every participant’s data was collected individually. The study
was conducted in different phases adopting different qualitative methods for the development
of questionnaire. Pilot study was conducted on self drafted employer branding questionnaire
followed by main study. Sample size was appropriate for both study.
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2) Qualitative research; focus group discussion and in depth interview of employers and
employees to explore constructs and items.(Appendix A,B,C,D,E)
4) Item generation based on literature review, focus group discussion, in depth interview
5) Purification of Items
Expert opinion
Verbal protocol analysis
Pretest
9) Big five personality (McCrae and Costa, 1996) 44 items questionnaire administration
1. Self developed employer brand questionnaire for employers and employees after
(Appendix I)
Big Five Personality Test (McCrae and Costa, 1996): Big five Personality inventory is
one of the widely used personality test where the subject/participants is instructed to
mark items according to his/her real self . Big Five inventory consists of 44 items
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44 items of big 5 inventory personality questionnaire( attached in Appendix I )and
interpretation has been done according to the scoring and reverse scoring suggested
Sampling Procedure Hinkin (1995) suggests that all studies should report a complete
description of the sample. Selection of participants ensured that they were “appropriate”
opinion leaders with well – developed views on the research topic (Minichiello, Aroni,
Timewell, & Alexander, 1995).Earlier studies have been mostly conducted on final year
students who are the new labor market entrants (Breaugh, 1992; Rynes, 1991). This dilutes
their generalizability on the overall all labour market (Rynes et al, 1999). This is because
these students may result directly to job postings than do experienced workers (Cable &
Turban, 2003).By collecting the data from experienced employees have tried to bridge this
gap and can be generalized to include a larger population of prospective employees in
different stages of their concerns suitably, mostly hypothetical organisation have been used as
a measure of attraction in various experimental researches on recruitment (Highhouse,
Stierwalt, et al, 1999; Honeycut & Rusen, 1997; Turban & Keon, 1993). As noted by Barber
(1998), it is important to complement the hypothetical nature of past research with similar
studies of actual organisation
In the Pilot study a total of 50 employers and 77 employees participated. The employers were
the managers of different organisation from Delhi and National Capital Region (NCR) and
the employees were the final year students of management of business administration who
were also the job aspirants. In the main study, 318 employers were selected randomly from
different organisations and 287 employees’from different business institutions of Delhi and
National Capital Region (NCR). Under employer category respondents were human resource
consultants. managers, top management, decision makers. Employee sampling unit was
business management students of Delhi/NCR who has qualified university entrance exam to
get enrolled for the post graduation course in mangement. These students are more likely to
enter managerial and professional ranks and will be highly sought after by organisations (Ng
& Burke, 2006). National Capital Region (NCR) is a hub of multinational & reputed Indian
organisations, management professionals working there has a fair idea about these
organisations. This justifies the selection of postgraduate management school students &
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working managers in Delhi/ NCR for this research. The prospective employee participants
had completed their summer internship and training in different organisation as the
compulsory component of their degree completion. Further this group has also done live
organisational researches by observation, discussion and other techniques. Students had
gained fair knowledge about the employment trends, recruitment modes, selection
procedures, induction, training and development practices, employee salary incentives and
other benefits by interacting to employees of different industry during live projects. Final
year management students had already submitted and presented their research report to the
university supervisors and subject experts so they had good idea about the workplace.
Students were also part of the corporate club and they were responsible to connect with the
corporate houses and deliver presentation to those organisations this process had imparted
real leaning to them about the organisations. Corporate exposure of students imparted them
real encounter to the organisational settings so their opinion on employer branding aspects
can be considered significant. The other groups of the participants were the experienced
employers from different organisations and industry. The same practices were followed for
both the pilot study and the main study. On the other words, the data for both pilot study and
the main study were collected from the right opinion leader of organisations and the
management institutions.
Rapport formation with each participants, or group of participants for exploratory research
was followed by data collection. Employer branding questionnaire instruction and Big 5
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personality factors guidelines were provided to them at both organisational setting and the
business institutions. Exploratory research was conducted in many stages and phases. The
qualitative research was conducted during the relatively leisure hour of the participants. Rest
interval was given to avoid research fatigue. The conduction procedure for both
organisational setting and the business institutions were similar in the entire study. The in
depth interview of the top management, human resource heads was followed individually to
Rapport formation:
Employer brand research seems interesting and innovative to some respondents so they came
forward to participate in the in-depth interview. Professional participants were quite excited
to share their perspective about the recent employer brand scenario. In fact, many of them
were looking ahead for discussion opportunity to academia people to address their industry
academia gap concerns. Therefore, they shared their issues challenges along with their
employer brand strategy. Students too were eager to express their placement preferences,
concerns .Warm and cordial environment was there to ensure realistic answers. Students have
high career dreams irrespective of their competence. Expectation management was done
properly after discussing about recent economic scenario and organisational expectation to
ensure realistic responses. Challenges were also faced in some cases during data collection
from employer perspective ,as non disclosure agreement (NDA) of the organisations was in
place so top management were bit hesitant to share their brand secret .Researcher tried to
remain confined and respect top professionals concerns. Avoiding unnecessary probing
ensured cordial, pleasant environment, which lead to good thought exchange. Employers
were keen to share their wisdom to the academia for right training of the students to make
them employable. This research has also necessitated the need to explore organizational,
acadmecians concern for industry academia interface, campus corporate connect.
Researcher developed employer brand questionnaire by exploring the insights from multiple
sources and referring many research scholars inputs.Vikram Kapoor employer branding study
and other empirical research was referred to get the insights for questionnaire development.
White papers, top research consultant study were also referred to develop it in a
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comprehensive approach. The questionnaire for employer branding was designed for both
employers and employees perspective. Besides the demographic profile, the questionnaire
consists of three dimensions as an important attributes of employer brand for an organisation,
organisational reputation, organisational culture and human resource management processes.
Communication Strategy was also considered as an important component. Communication
strategies were further categorized as Events conducted by organisations, digital
communication channel and print communication media according to the employer and
employees perspectives. Survey questionnaire was designed having one open-ended question
for opinion and feedback, close-ended, multiple-choice as well as rating scale questions were
also incorporated. Very few questions were dichotomous. Most of the questions were
multiple choices to be answered on Likert scale to save time .
Researcher has conducted qualitative study at different stages and phases for employers and
employees.It helped to overcome challenge of one research method by
another.Problem points,issues were clarified by passing through the different stages.
Multi-method strategy was used where research questions have been answered by
using two or more data collection procedures or two or more research methods each
of which are from the same qualitative or quantitative tradition (Campbell & Fiske,
1959). It is “within method” kind (Denzin, 1978, p.301) which uses multiple
techniques within a given method to collect & interpret data and tests the degree of
external validity (Jick, 1979). Researcher has also tried to identify & examine other
non – theoretical variables (Dawes & Brown, 2000). So qualitative research was done.
The exploratory study in this research was qualitative in nature. It comprised of
several methods namely open-ended questionnaire, depth interviews, focus group
discussions and content analysis of the main page and career section of official
websites of different organisations to identify key constituents of these constructs. So
prospective employees and employers were the respondents of the research.
Cober, Brown, Keeping & Levy (2004) presented a model describing how organisational
websites influence applicant attraction. Internal communication can be an effective means to
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influence fit perceptions (Dineen Ash & Noe, 2002) and applicant attraction (Cober Brown,
Levy, Cober, & Keeping, 2003; Van Birgelen Wetzels & van Dolen, 2008; Williamson
Lepak & King, 2003). Information such as value students and organisational policies can
provide information about the organisations culture on the recruitment website (Braddy
Meade & Kroustalis 2006; Kroustalis & Meade, 2007). It was also important to understand
the way in which the organisations try to project themselves & distinguish themselves from
their competitors before the prospective applicants. For this purpose the methodology used by
Ewing et al. (2002) was used. The official websites of many organisations were studied. The
home page; media and the career section for the websites were reviewed. These included
information about the organisations policies what it is like to work for the organisation,
employee testimonials and additional content such as information about career development
opportunities were studied which were coded in line with the pattern coding approach of
qualitative research (Ewing et al, 2002).Organisations studied are in listed in Appendix F.
These are some key points which were explored after content analysis.
Its People Diversity, committed, energized, valued, satisfied, hard working, and anxious to be
first with new solutions, highly motivated or talented, whose ideas can make the difference
etc.
Ethics & Integrity Corporate social performance, values, company with a conscience, fair,
discipline, integrity & honesty, exemplary governance & ethics, conduct with dignity, ethical
etc.
b) Depth Interviews
To gain insights pertinent to employer brand and related constructs depth interview was
conducted with manpower acquisition heads from different industry. The sample size did not
have to be large since “the validity meaningfulness and insights generated from qualitative
inquiry have more to do with the information richness of the cases selected and the
observational / analytical capabilities of the researcher than with sample size.” (Patton, 2002,
p.185).
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The objective of this qualitative study was to gauge the importance of organisational efforts
for attracting prospective employees, how do they perceive & portray their employer
branding etc. The discussion guide for the interviews is attached as Appendix C,D,E.There
were three rounds of in depth interview firstly human resource executives, managers were
interviewed by Appendix C questionnaire. Appendix D questionnaire were used to
understand the perspective of faculty and placement mentors. Finally few human resource
heads were approached for quick round of interview by appendix E questionnaire.
Questionnaires attached in appendices provided structure to the interview. These interviews
helped in establishing a range of responses, which further helped in finding the variables for
this study.
c) Depth Interviews
A Depth Interviews is needed for getting deep insights (Malhotra, 2008). Two non-
probability sampling techniques, purposive & snowball were utilized in the selection of
interview participants to ensure that they were “appropriate” opinion leaders with well-
developed views on the research topic (Minichiello, et al., 1995). Post placement stage
interviews were conducted to understand the perspective of the students with the help of
Appendix B.
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3.6.3 Processing and analysis of Qualitative Data
All the recorded data was transcribed in Microsoft word. The transcription was done at the
time of interview and immediately after interview for right representations. Understanding
was developed by reading the transcripts properly further followed by drafting the
questionnaire for focus group discussions. Data was categorized and classified into various
themes. Data was described and interpreted .The interpretation was based on collective
understanding and was supported by the literature review on employer branding.
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1991; Mayfield, Mayfield, & Kopf, 1995. It also recommended that in the case of complex
constructs, it may be advisable to divide the construct into sub-scales (Spector, 1992).
Employer brand dimensions construct, and communication strategy was further divided into
items. Guided by the extant literature & exploratory data, items were subsequently derived
deductively and inductively for employer brand .These items were then purified and pretested
to make it more exhaustive.
Another component of item generation is the content validation by experts (Grant & Davis,
1997) by making use of a sorting process whereby other persons review and sort the items
into construct groups based on the theoretical construct definitions (Hinkin, 1995). This
method of construct validity assessment may be successfully accomplished using either
persons with experience in the particular field of interest or persons without experience in the
area being researched( Schriesheim & Hinkin, 1998)to identify and delete theoretically
incoherent items and thus ensuring that the item in a scale demonstrate content adequately
(Hinkin, 1995).
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identify respondents difficulties in forming answers to the survey questions (Bolton, 1991
p.559).
For further improvement of questionnaire two doctoral student of premier business school
and two human resource managers were consulted. Sorting is a cognitive task that requires
intellectual ability rather than work experience, the use of doctoral students at this stage is
appropriate (Schreinsham & Himen 1990) they were asked to “Constantly THINK ALOUD
while they were deciding on the answers” (Bolton, 1991).Their thoughts were recorded &
later transcribed and coded into verbal & non-verbal cues which were used to amend
questionnaire.
c). Pretesting
Questionnaire pretesting entails on small pilot survey to determine a questionnaire, which can
be improved to minimize response errors, such as a respondent misinterpreting a question
(Converse & Presser, 1986). The questionnaires were further pretested on management
students and human resource managers for content and clarity. Respondents were asked to
review the questionnaires for structure readability ambiguity and completeness (Dillman,
1978) for appropriate vocabulary attention and respondent wellbeing (Boltan, 1991).
After going through all the qualitative data analysis rounds employer and employees were
came to the common consent and the questionnaire were streamlined refined keeping
employers and employees perspective in mind. It was further discussed with the two human
resource heads and they come to the common consensus to keep constructs and items same in
the questionnaire for both employers and employees perspective. Therefore, the same
constructs and items were kept and two questionnaires were drafted one from employers and
other from employee’s perspective. Both questionnaires are attached in Appendices.
For the standardization of the self-developed questionnaire on Employer brand, the researcher
followed both reliability and validity of the questionnaire. Further the content validity and
reliability of questionnaire was done. The reliability of the questionnaire followed inter-
correlating the dimensions and factor according to the employer and employees perspective.
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Generally, validity is referred to accuracy in question design, however; reliability is referred
to the consistency of results means checking the probability of getting the same results once
repeated.
a) Validity Check: Questionnaire for developing Employer brand framework was drafted
after a detailed and critical review of the more than two hundred academic research
papers and articles. Organisational research studies of Great place to work, employer of
choice by prominent research consultancy were explored to get insight for correct
b) Reliability Test- Pilot Survey: The primary purpose of the pilot study was to measure
the extent to which the instrument is able to “provide data of sufficient quality & quantity
to satisfy the objectives of the research” (Hunt, Sparkman & Wilcox, 1982, p.270). This
was done to increase observed variance and to strengthen the generalizability of the
results. Pilot study was performed to analyze the quality of results and questionnaires for
employees and employers perspective. In the pilot study, researcher calculated Cronbach's
Alpha for reliability test and factor analysis to reduce the variables. Researcher also
researcher used a test-retest technique with small group to see if the results remain
consistent with the same questionnaire use more than once. The researcher used split-half
reliability methodology to check if the different sets of responses give the similar results
also.
c) Seventy-seven prospective employee respondent’s data was analyzed in the pilot study
and found with no multicolinearity. However, results were skewed towards high
importance rating. Researcher tested reliability of the data to check internal inconsistency
in the data. Tests were positive and required no change in the questionnaire as Cronbach's
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Alpha value was above 0.7 as shown in the below mentioned table. Factor analysis was
performed on the branding questions and allowed researchers to investigate concepts that
are not easily measured directly by collapsing a large number of variables into a few
interpretable underlying factors.The researcher then collated the main employer brand
dimensions and factor and first analysis was based on the main parameters and then
moved deeper for sub parts of branding dimensions/factor and found that there was high
correlation but without any high negative correlation among sub factors. That also proved
Cronbach’s alpha –
.932 .946 77
In the pilot analysis, researcher found that results were aligned with the original questionnaire
approach. Fifty employer respondents data was analyzed in the similar manner as performed
for employee perspective. There was no multicolinearity found for employer perspective
responses and required no changes in the main questionnaire. Employer results were in the
same direction as in employee and responses showed inclination towards high importance
rating. Reliability of the data was checked to see internal inconsistency in the data. Tests
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were positive and required no change in the questionnaire as Cronbach's Alpha value was
above 0.7 as shown in the below mentioned table. Similar to the employee perspective, factor
analysis was performed on the employer brand questions and allowed researchers to
investigate concepts that are not easily measured directly by collapsing a large number of
variables into a few interpretable underlying factors. Researcher collated the main brand
factor and first analyzed it based on the main factors and then moved deeper for sub parts of
brand factors and found that there was high correlation but without any high negative
correlation among sub factors. That also proved the association within sub factor and part of
that group for employer responses.
Reliability Statistics
.853 .879 50
Self developed questionnaire after pilot study was administered for main study .Appendix
G,H questionnaire was administered to collect data from employers’ and employees
perspective.Big 5 structured questionnaire is attached in Appendix I to evaluate personality
type of employees. The data was collected online as well as physically as per the
convenience, schedule provided by the employer respondents. Questionnaire was
administered in the classroom at the pre placement stage. At the post placement, stage
students were busy in their placement where ensuring their presence in the classroom was
challenging so the questionnaire was administered physically as well as posted online with a
link through Google drive where the respondent just clicked on the link to respond.
Data was entered individually for each test item then analyzed using SPSS software 21.0
version. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were done for entire information collected
related to employer brand framework questionnaire and the big five-factor personality
inventory. For the descriptive data analysis, mean, and standard deviation were calculated for
test and sub test of the test items used in the study. For inferential statistics Pearson’s product
movement correlation, Student’ test and analysis of variance was followed for comparison
between the scores collected from employer and employees.
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Big five factor personality inventory data was analyzed based on the scoring manual.
The direct and reverse scoring according to the test manuals were done for
attached in Appendix I)and interpretation has been done according to the scoring and
based on five-point scale.All the data were entered item wise in the excel sheet for
interpretation. The information related to demographic profile were one’s taken and
This chapter has provided the blueprint of the research. Qualitative research design has been
extensively discussed .Questionnaire development, sample selection, and pilot study has been
explained.
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