New applicant decision making understanding the influence of salary, family-friendly and life-friendly policies, and culture as influential organizational attributes /

by Cunningham, Christopher J.

Steve M. Jex, Advisor Recruitment of the best personnel is a major challenge for organizations. A neglected concern within this literature is how organizational efforts to improve employees’ work-nonwork interfaces might influence applicant decision making. Several important questions related to applicant attraction were addressed in the present study, including: (a) whether familyfriendly/life-friendly policies and supportive organizational culture would influence an individual’s attraction, (b) how the choice of an organization from a set of options would be made under the influence of these attributes, (c) how the influence of several organizational attributes might differ depending on the stage of an applicant’s decision making, (d) how the decision making process may differ depending on an individual’s salient identity, and (e) whether the type of policies offered by an organization (either family-friendly or life-friendly) would influence the importance of the number of policies and culture attributes during the decision making process. Specifically, salary information was combined with an organization’s family- and lifefriendly policies, and culture, as three potentially significant attractors for young career starters (i.e., college seniors). Utilization of a phased narrowing decision making task made it possible to trace participants’ perceptions of organizational attribute importance as they shifted across the decision making stages leading to the final choices of organizations to pursue for employment. Analyses of both quantitative and qualitative data revealed at least partial support for several of the hypothesized effects, including: (a) differing influence of organizational attributes across stages of decision making and (b) differential impact of the three attributes when iii organizations were framed as family-friendly versus life-friendly. No support was found for the hypothesis that life-friendly organizations would be more generally attractive, as indicated by higher intentions to pursue for employment, than family-friendly organizations. The potential importance of the individual difference factor of identity salience in the decision making process was also considered by several exploratory analyses were also conducted. Results suggest this newly developed scale holds promise for future research. iv