Study On The Relationship Between Technological Enterprise Employer Brand And Employee Innovation Behavior

With China's economy running into the new normal,the driving force of economic development changes from investment to innovation.In the new normal economy stage,China aspires to promote its role from the world manufacturer(“made in China”)to the world innovator(“created in China”).As the vital part of Chinese innovation system,most technological enterprises are engaging in the industrials that are supporting the country's industrial policies and with high technology contents.The qualities and quantities of their innovation products are closely related with the country's overall innovation.Therefore,inspiring employees' innovation enthusiasm,willingness and behavior in technological enterprises and enhancing their innovation outcomes concerns the country's aspiration to be a country with strong innovation power as well as the enterprises' own sustainable development.Previous studies have mostly focused on the role of individual,leadership,and team factors in predicting employees' innovation behavior,but how to inspire employees' innovation behavior badly needs a new breakthrough.The employer brand,as the product brand of human resource management service,has been confirmed to have great impacts on organizational innovation performance,organizational citizenship behavior,work outcomes and other variables through a variety of methods.However,whether the employer brand can have a significant effect on the employees' innovation behavior,which is closely related to the innovation performance and the work output,has not been covered by scholars.The current study explores whether the technological enterprises' employer brands impact on employees' innovation behavior and how,from the aspect that employer brand construction is an inner experience perceived by the employees.This research has important theoretical values and practical significance to promote the employer brand building and employees' innovation for domestic technological enterprises.Based on literature reviews,exploratory interviews and strict theoretical deduction,a model of the relationship between employer brand and employee's innovation behavior was constructed and confirmed in the current study.And the model was validated by a survey data of 946 employees in 81 companies.There are three issues involved in the current study as follows:Firstly,the dimensional research of employer brand from employees' perception in the technological enterprises was proposed.The dimensions of employer brand were found through explore factor analysis based on literature review and exploratory interview,which laid the foundation for the choice of scales about employer brand measurement.Secondly,the inner mechanism about the relationship of employer brand and employee's innovation behavior was proposed.In order to explore the chain reaction and inner mechanism model,exploratory interviews and strict theoretical deduction were adopted.Thirdly,the test and analysis of the inner mechanism about the employer brand's effect on employees' innovation behaviors was carried out.Through a small sample survey and a large range of questionnaires,the study got the firsthand data,and tested the inner mechanism model and hypotheses with the help of SPSS19.0,AMOS 17.0 and HLM6.05.Six conclusions were found using both conception and empirical researches,qualitative and quantitative analysis,that is:Firstly,people go to work not just for struggling for life now,but one job means more about the pursuit of happiness and self fulfillment for people in the new employer's economic era.So creating employer brand and building a happy enterprise becomes an important mission for one organization.A good employer should improve employees' satisfaction in terms of compensation and benefit,job arrangement,personal development,company strength,corporate culture and so on.Secondly,the employer brand,as a service product brand of human resources,also has the functions of value orientation and basically branding.To rebuild employer brand,the enterprises should put forward a unique and true brand positioning,combining the enterprise's development strategy and corporate culture and fully considering the demands of employees.In the process of building employer brand,it is important to transmit its value orientation,to honor the company's commitment to its employees,and make employees perceive the uniqueness and authenticity of the employer.Only in this way can the enterprise's human resource management practice form the employer brand.That is to say,the employer brand is an ideal result of the human resource management practice.Only if the employer brand has been formed,the human resource management practice can implement its functions of identification,competition,increasing value,and then promote the enterprises' healthy and sustainable development.Thirdly,it is found that all dimensions of the employer brand can directly affect the employees' innovation behavior.The five dimensions are the job arrangement,corporate culture,compensation and benefit,company strength and personal development,with their relative importance in a descending order.Fourthly,the research verified the chain mediating effect of work happiness and job involvement between employer brand and employees' innovation behavior.There are four ways for the employer brand to effect employees' innovation behavior.The first path is “employer brand-employee innovation behavior”,the second one “employer brand-work happiness-employee innovation behavior”,the third “employer brand-work happiness-work engagement-employee innovation behavior”,and the fourth one is “employer brand-work engagement-employee innovation behavior”.Fifthly,it is found that career resilience can moderate the relationship between work happiness and employees' innovation behavior.At the same state of well-being,individuals with high professional resilience show more innovation behavior,and when the individual's well-being and career resilience are both high,the individual's innovation behavior shows a higher level.Sixthly,it is also found that employees' job position and age have a positive effect on employees' innovation behavior,while the working age has a negative impact on the employees' innovation behavior.There are no significant effects as to the nature of enterprise,employees' gender and academic qualifications.The relationship model of employer brand and employees' innovation behavior and the findings in the research not only enriched the theories in related research fields,but also provided beneficial enlightenments and suggestions for the human resources management practice.The main innovations of this study are embodied in the following three aspects:Firstly,the traditional researches of employer brand are more from the external aspect,emphasizing its attraction and retention to talents and so on.With the global economic recession,the employer brand researches are shifting to how to improve employees' satisfaction,work outcome,work engagement,organizational citizenship behavior and other elements.Based on the internal logic,this research confirmed its influence on employees' innovation behavior,thus expanded its research scope.Secondly,adopting a comprehensive knowledge from disciplines of economics,psychology,sociology and organizational behavior and based on the brand theory,behavior theory,social exchange theory,self-determination and resource conservation,the current study constructed a multi-layer employee innovation behavior driving model,identified two key variables of employer brand impacting employees' innovation behavior,that is,work happiness and work engagement,and found a new research path to study the driving forces for employees' innovation behaviors.Thirdly,the individual level variables,such as employees' innovation behaviors,work happiness and work engagement,are nested in organizations.However,the real values of organizational level or team level variables are measured in terms of individual level variables in the traditional studies,which ignored the interactions between the organizational level variables and the individual level variables.Thus it brings a large error to the actual results.The cross layer analysis method was used in this study,having considered the different influence of individual level variables on individual behavior in different groups,which improves the valid of the method.The current research put forward four suggestions for the management practices:Firstly,the employer brand construction is a complex,systematic and long-term project,and the enterprise can construct and manage its employer brand by locating its employer brand value precisely,shaping its unique employer brand accurately,selecting media carefully to spread its employer brand image,and maintaining its employer brand carefully.Secondly,the enterprises should attach more importance to the promotion of employees' work happiness.On the one hand,enterprises should improve employees' job satisfaction and happy experience by satisfying employees' various needs.On the other hand,they should help employees to achieve their value pursuit.Only in this way can the employees unify subjectively and objectively,working happily and meaningfully,and the individuals can truly feel happy and produce more behaviors that are beneficial for the organizations.Thirdly,the enterprises should strengthen the training of employees' career resilience.On the one hand,the enterprises can improve the inner strength of the individuals by building their positive and healthy personality traits.On the other hand,enterprises should actively provide supportive management environment to improve external supports for employees' career resilience.In addition,enterprises can also improve individuals' professional resilience level by providing career portfolio and scenario simulations during the management practices.Fourthly,the enterprises should try to improve employees' work engagement.For enterprises,there are three methods to be used.First,enterprises should stimulate employees' intrinsic motivation,and enhance their psychological sense of safety,meaningfulness and availability.Second,enterprises should improve the fitness between employees' willingness and organizations' appointment in terms of personnel choice and employing,decision-making participating and culture construction of the enterprise.Third,enterprises should improve employees' abundant perception of job resources and reduce their perception of work pressure,through job demanding,resource analysis,timing performance feedback,and performance decomposition and so on,to enhance employees' work engagement.