What Influences Employees to Become Digital Advocates? : A Quantitative Study of the Relationship Between Employer Branding and Digital Employee Advocacy in Industrial Organisations

Abstract: Since the introduction of social media, the corporate communication landscape has changed significantly, and thus organisations need to find new innovative ways to communicate. One emerging strategy is digital employee advocacy, which ultimately means that employees voluntarily endorse their employers on social media platforms. As of now however, research on how organisations should operate in order to encourage such behaviour is rather unexplored and inadequate, and a stronger understanding of the motivation and underlying mechanisms is needed. One concept that is conceptually identified as a driver for employee advocacy is employer branding, both directly and indirectly through organisational commitment. Therefore, this thesis aims at investigating and analysing the relationship between employer branding and digital employee advocacy as well as the dimensions of employer branding. Ultimately, the purpose of this thesis is to generate insights on which industrial organisations can build strategies for digital employee advocacy programs. This was done by collecting quantitative data through a questionnaire distributed among employees in a Swedish industrial organisation. Based on the data, a PLS-SEM analysis was conducted that both evaluated a newly developed employer branding scale and the relationships between employer branding and digital employee advocacy. The results from the analysis show that employer branding consists of five dimensions: training and development, healthy work atmosphere, ethics and CSR, work life balance as well as compensation and benefits. Furthermore, it can be concluded that employer branding does not lead to digital employee advocacy directly. It can however be shown that the relationships from employer branding to organisational commitment and from organisational commitment to digital employee advocacy are significant and that organisational commitment has a full mediating effect on the direct relationship between employer branding and digital employee advocacy. Thus, organisations need to recognise organisational commitment as a necessity, and employer branding as an instrument, for achieving digital employee advocacy.