“Organizational attractiveness: an empirical study on employees attitudes in lithuanian business sector”

Measurement of employer’s attractiveness has been given much attention in many countries all over the world, but there was no extensive research performed in Lithuania so far, providing empirical evidence to define the landscape of organizational attractiveness in Lithuanian business sector. The aim of this study (N = 1020 respondents) is to identify which dimensions make organizations attractive as employers in Lithuanian business sector. The article employs a research approach based on a postpositivistic perspective. The relevant literature on organizational attractiveness is critically reviewed, analyzed, compared and generalized. Addressing research aim, a scale to measure organizational attractiveness as an employer was developed and administered in Lithuanian business sector in such a manner. Existing methodologies measuring organizational attractiveness were analyzed composing a list of 67 dimensions. Using content validity, scale comprising 30 dimensions was developed to measure organizational attractiveness of companies in Lithuanian business sector. A telephone interview survey method for data collection was used. Descriptive statistics (means, standard deviations, and frequencies) is used to analyze the data of the survey. 30 dimensions of organizational attractiveness were rank-ordered according to their means in descending order from most important to least important drivers of employer’s attractiveness. Specifically, the results suggested that good working atmosphere, adequate salary and interesting job are key to the attractiveness as an employer of business companies in Lithuania as perceived by their employees. The article also discusses the implications of the findings.


INTRODUCTION
After the depths of the great economic recession of 2008-12 a significant uncertainty and ambiguity have emerged in the labor markets affected by the fall in GDP and causing high unemployment, high level of redundancy, falling average incomes and increased inequality. Business firms were unable to operate normally -some of them have bankrupted and all their employees have lost their jobs, some other were reducing costs by lowering salaries, terminating employees and not hiring new ones.
On the other hand -human capital, suffering from the financial crisis all over the world, remains the most valuable asset of any company and crucial to its effective performance, competitiveness and financial success. One may argue that because of the global financial crisis of 2008 and succeeding global economic recession so far hovering around employer's attractiveness has depreciated. Not even likely. On contrary, living with un-certainty has not diminished but even increased the importance of attracting and retaining the best employees, meanwhile the talented job seekers have enough options and are choosing the most attractive employers.
Thus, in today's business environment, war for talent remains the hot topic in strategic human resource management agendas and no signs it could decline in importance in the future as the jobs become more complex and require highly qualified employees. That is why so many people are unemployed and at the same time there are large numbers of job vacancies. Being an attractive employer undoubtedly stands for the most important element of finding the right talents (EB Insights, 2011), since people want to work for organizations with strong and positive reputation and prestige (Rousseau, 2008) in preference to higher wages, thus expecting a pride, which will be provided by organizational membership (Cable & Turban, 2006). Keeping in mind that talents are scarce and their attraction becomes increasingly complex, organizational attractiveness turns to be a winning strategy applied by top companies like Google, Adidas, and Deloitte and definitely urged for "the millions of other companies around the world who have similar challenges" (Minchington, 2011). Eventually, organizational attractiveness helps to build a more consistent employment experience and communication (EB Insights, 2011), and retain current employees assuring their engagement in the culture and strategy of the company they work for (Backhaus and Tikoo, 2004).
Organizational attractiveness for employer in influential approach and a new discourse of human resource management (Martin et al., 2005) has evoked a considerable research attention. The literature examines its theoretical foundations and conceptual framework, analyzes its dimensionality (Ambler and Barrow, 1996 (Davies, 2008;Cable and Edwards, 2004;Fulmer et al., 2003;Mosley, 2007) and effects of corporate social performance (Turban and Greening, 1997;Albinger and Freeman, 2000).
Nevertheless, despite the great scientific interest in organizational attractiveness as an employer and its unceasing popularity among practitioners, research in the field still poses a number of critical questions and issues for management scholars. The aforementioned economic recession has caused numerous breaches of psychological contracts and, logically, strengthened the focus on social security. The great generational shift with retiring Baby Boomers and Generation Y starting to predominate in the labor market brings the epic change in the work-related norms, values and attitudes of the workforce and is fundamental to understanding what employment practices determine organizational attractiveness in the new context of labor market volatility and uncertainty.
Moreover, what works in one industry sector or country may be quite different from what works in another, therefore this paper analyzes Lithuanian employees' attitudes and explores what employment experience facilitates organizational attractiveness as an employer of business companies enabling them to differentiate from their competitors in the labor market. It should be noted that there was no such extensive research performed in Lithuania so far, providing empirical evidence to define the landscape of organizational attractiveness in Lithuanian business sector, and allowing to identify dimensions which make service business companies attractive as employers.
Research object -organizational attractiveness in Lithuanian business sector.
The aim of the research is to determine the dimensions of organizational attractiveness of Lithuanian business companies as perceived by the employees.

ORGANIZATIONAL ATTRACTIVENESS CONSTRUCT
Organizational attractiveness as an employer denotes "the envisioned benefits that a potential employee sees in working for a specific organization" (Berthon et al., 2005), or the degree to which potential and current employees perceive organizations as good places to work (Jiang and Iles, 2011). Organizational attractiveness is also referred to as "the power that draws applicants' attention to focus on an employer brand and encourages existing employees to stay" (Ibid). Ehrhart and Ziegert (2005) have defined organizational attraction as "getting candidates to view the organization as a positive place to work" and examined it from applicant's perspective. The authors present a theoretical framework of applicant attraction, encompassing three metatheories as summarized in Table  1, i.e. the environment processing metatheory, which is comprised of the image theory, signalling theory, expectancy theory, etc.; the interactionist processing metatheory, based on the idea of fit between individual and environmental characteristics (person-job abbreviated as P-J and person-organization abbreviated as P-O fit); and the self-processing metatheory, which involves relation between attitudes and views of the self and attraction to organization (e.g., the social learning theory, consistency theory, social identity theory).  (Spence, 1973) In the absence of complete information, applicants interpret the information they have about an organization as signals of organizational characteristics Image theory (Beach, 1990) Individuals decide among job and organizational attractiveness by considering how those alternatives fit their image of what is desired Heuristic-systematic model (Eagly and Chaiken, 1984) Type of cognitive processing that an individual implements depends on characteristics of the message being processed Relationship between the perceived environment and attraction: the way in which the perceived environment characteristics are processed and why individuals' perceptions of environment influence their attraction Exposure-attitude hypothesis (Zajonc, 1968) Repeated exposure to an object yields increasingly positive evaluations of it Expectancy theory (Vroom, 1964) Individuals are attracted to jobs or organizations that they perceive to offer valued characteristics Generalizable decision processing model (Soelberg, 1967) Individuals choose their most preferred job or organization on the basis of their perceptions of the environment characteristics that are important to them (e.g., location, culture, firm size) Interactionist processing metatheory Objective fit: the extent to which actual characteristics of the environment interact with individual differences to predict the objective fit between a person and an organization Need-press theory (Murray, 1938) Environments have characteristics that either facilitate or inhibit the satisfaction of individual's needs: importance of the match between individual's needs and the actual environment's "positive press", or ability to satisfy those needs Interactional psychology (Lewin, 1935) Behavior is a function of the interaction between person and situational characteristics: importance of the similarity between person and actual environment characteristics in predicting attraction Subjective fit: pertain to the process by which individuals determine whether they fit with a particular work environment.
Theory of work adjustment (Dawis and Lofquist, 1984) Individuals desire "correspondence" or congruence with their work environmentwork adjustment that is related to positive work outcomes (e.g., tenure and satisfaction) Attraction-selectionattrition theory (Schneider, 1987) People are differentially attracted to jobs and/or organizations with certain characteristics that they perceive match their own Instrumental attributes signal the applicants about objective, concrete and factual characteristics that a job/organization either has or does not have and, accordingly, determine company's perceived attractiveness as an employer . Instrumental attributes, in order to influence initial assessments of organizational attractiveness, should be visible, salient, manifesting organizational culture and values and, finally, differ across organizations (Lievens et al., 2001). Research on instrumental attributes found empirical evidence that medium-sized and large-sized, multinational and decentralized organizations were more attractive to potential applicants (Lievens et al., 2001); it was also revealed that applicants' attraction to the Belgian Army was mostly related to such instrumental dimensions as team/sports activities, structure and job security . The study by Nadler et al. (2010) suggested that work schedule flexibility positively affects potential employees' perceptions of organizational attractiveness.

Metatheories Theoretical mechanism Theories Proposition
Self-processing metatheory Influences on the relationship between fit and attraction: individuals' perceptions about themselves and their own attributes contribute by influencing the relationship between subjective fit and attraction.
Social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) People will be attracted to jobs and organizations based on the extent to which they believe they can succeed: individuals with higher self-efficacy are more likely to seek out environments with which they fit, based on their beliefs that they will be successful Consistency theory (Korman, 1966) Individuals with high self-esteem use cognitions about the self to guide choices, and they prefer work that corresponds to their self-image Social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1986) Self-concept is influenced by the evaluation of the group(s) with whom individual identifies: when organization is viewed positively, subjective fit should have a stronger influence on attraction It should be noted that personality trait-based inferences have predominantly showed out to be more important organization's attractiveness factor and differentiator than specific job/organization characteristics (e.g., Lievens and Highhouse, 2003;Martin, 2007). That supports evidence from marketing literature, where emotional appeal is given preference over functional benefits in the marketplace with similar products or services.
Organization attractiveness as a recruitment outcome variable has been also explored by Chapman et al. (2005) in their meta-analysis of 667 coefficients from 71 studies on recruitment research examining relationships between recruitment predictors and applicant attraction outcomes. The authors reported that perceptions of person-organization fit and job/organization characteristics were the strongest predictors of various recruitment outcomes (Ployhart, 2006

MEASUREMENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL ATTRACTIVENESS
As Flextime "The company's job offer includes a flextime plan"

Organizational attractiveness
Five-item measure, e.g., "I would find this company to be an attractive place to work" Accordingly, operationalization and measurement of organizational attractiveness has evoked considerable attention and resulted in different instruments, scales and approaches.
The Great Place to Work Institute carries out probably the most famous worldwide research and assessment of an attractive workplace, as well as the election of the best ones, which is performed using the Great Place to Work survey tool Trust Index (What is a Great Workplace?, 2014). This tool has been used to evaluate employers since 1980, concluding that trust, pride and joy make a workplace great. Another well-known tool is Gallup's Q12, designed to measure employee engagement ( Table 5, first column) enabling to measure organizational attractiveness of business companies and identify existing employee attitudes towards employment experience in Lithuanian business sector.
Administration of the scale allowed determining the overall organizational attractiveness of business organization, employee attitudes towards particular features of employment experience, to identify the unique values provided by the company to its employees, as well as to see the gaps or areas for improvement.
Cluster sampling was used to calculate a sample of service companies from the whole population of Lithuanian business sector firms (N = 19433). Calculations were performed aiming at a confidence level of 95 and confidence interval of ± 3%. Ensuring representativeness, the quotes of company size was applied, namely: 0-4 employees (16.4%), 5-9 employees (39.7%), 10-19 employees (21.7%), 20-49 employees (12.0%), 50-99 employees (5.2%), 100 and more employees (5.0%). Accordingly, the sample size of n = 1020 allows to generalize to the whole population with the confidence level of 95% and the confidence interval of ± 2.99%.
Research ethics was ensured asking respondents for an agreement to participate in the survey, allowing a refusal option, guaranteeing respondent's confidence and anonymity. Answers were recorded precisely and incorruptly.
A telephone survey was used to collect the data as a method of exploratory research. 10-point response scale was used for evaluation of each item capturing employees' attitudes about the actual employment experience in the particular business company. Respondents were asked to assess how important is the statement about actual employment experience as the feature of organizational attractiveness, with "1" used to indicate "least important" (lowest perceived value) and "10" -"most important" (highest perceived value).

RESULTS
The survey was carried out during the period of June-July, 2016. Table 3 below shows demographic characteristics of the sample (N = 1020). Research results analysis allowed ranking dimensions of organizational attractiveness as perceived by the existing employees of the surveyed business companies from most important to least important, or, presumably most and least manifested employment experiences in current organizations. Table 4 reports descriptive statistics -means and standard deviations for employee attitudes towards dimensions of organizational attractiveness of Lithuanian business companies in descending order. The total mean of responses (M = 8.44) as a threshold was calculated to facilitate the interpretation of results. As Table 4 demonstrates, 19 dimensions were found above the threshold, indicat-ing, that Good working atmosphere (M = 9.65) is the most appreciated organizational attractiveness dimension in Lithuanian business sector, followed by Adequate (satisfactory) salary (M = 9.63) and Interesting job (M = 9.61). It could be presupposed that these features are key to the attractiveness as an employer of business companies in Lithuania as perceived by their employees.  Analyzing the data derived from the question about the overall organizational attractiveness of present workplace, it was found that respondents evaluate their current workplaces as a fairly attractive employer (M = 8.51; SD = 1.531). It can be seen from the data in Table 5, that only 2% (20) of employees gave their employers the score from 1 to 4 in a 10-point response scale (with 1 meaning "not attractive" at all and 10 meaning "very attractive"), percibing them as not attractive working places. 16.1% (165) of respondents evaluated their employers from 5 to 7 indicating that their attitudes towards business company they work for are mediocre and they are not appreciating their employment experience to a larger extent. 81.9% (835) of employees gave their companies a rating from 8 to 10, meaning that the majority of the sample is happy with their current workplaces and perceive them as an attractive employers.
Answering the question whether employees would recommend current organization to others as a good place to work most of them were pretty positive and said that they mostly would recommend their employers to the friends as a good place to work for (M = 8.48; SD = 1.720). As it is visible from Table 6, only 3% (30) would probably not recommend their employers to others, 17.2% (175) would be hesitating to recommend, although 11.5% gave their working places 7 points, meaning that their attitudes are not negative, but a number of employment experience improvements would be expected. Finally, 79.8% (815) have shown a strong confidence in their employers and expressed willingness to recommend them to potential employees. The Spearman correlation coefficient was used as a nonparametric measure to test the strength and direction of association between the evaluation of employer attractiveness and willingness to recommend it to others. Based on the results of the study (see Table 7) the more attractive employer is perceived by existing employees they will be more to recommend it as a good place to work for others . 6 , 6 3 s r = .05. p <  Note: ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
We are living in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world with the complex, segmented and ageing society, with companies soliciting candidates and not vice versa, targeting individuals based on their personal values, with the new generation of employees who are creative, innovative, fast-moving and who are comfortable with new technology and waiting for future leaders -culturally dexterous, knowing how to motivate and reward people of different backgrounds.
Organizational attractiveness as an employer -the degree to which potential and current employees perceive organization as good place to work -is surely no more a trend or a fad of HR as it was hesitated some years ago, but a paradigm shift changing the way of thinking and doing in attracting, retaining and motivating best employees. Organizations are starting to do it in new and different way. Firstly, discovering their labor-market identity, authenticity, philosophy, uniqueness, and the way of employment experience they are offering to existing and potential employees. And, secondly looking for people, who would be attracted and motivated by this package of values and would devote them for living their employer's brand.
Organizational attractiveness as an employer becomes a competitive strategy and even few would be opposing that, companies still lack knowledge what features would make them attractive as employers and practice how to embed these features to the daily HR practices.
The overview of conceptualization and operationalization of organizational attractiveness construct revealed its complexity and ambiguity. Although organizational attractiveness stems from perceived employment experience and is by nature an emergent phenomenon, deliberate efforts offering a compelling and unique package of benefits to its existing and potential employees, would definitely facilitate perception of organization as a good place to work.
For as much as previous research has put an emphasis on the potential applicant's perspective (e.g. The scale to measure employee attitudes and to determine the dimensions of organizational attractiveness was developed and administered in Lithuanian service business companies (N=1020).
Data analysis revealed that 19 employer attributes are positively linked to organizational attractiveness with good working atmosphere, adequate salary and interesting job being the key to the attractiveness as an employer of business companies in Lithuania as perceived by their employees. Further personal development, good relationship with supervisor and good relationship with colleagues were perceived as very important features, determining organizational attractiveness of business organizations by existing employees.
In comparison, it was found before (Bakanauskienė et al., 2016;Bendaravičienė, 2015), that in higher education sector employees place most emphasis on supervisor relationship, job satisfaction, fairness and trust, academic environment and working conditions.
Yet, surprisingly international profile of organization, job enrichment and enlargement, possibility to work from home and popularity of organization in social networks were not given considerable attention as drivers of employer's attractiveness. It could be speculated that these dimensions were not perceived by employees as crucial to employer's attractiveness because they are still rarely exploited by business organizations (e.g. in the case of possibility to work from home), or influenced by conditionally small representation of young generation <=25 among respondents, who probably would pay more attention to the popularity of organization in social networks. Further, job enrichment and enlargement is not new concept, though an uncommon practice in business companies requiring additional resources purposefully increasing job tasks and responsibilities, and making positions more challenging. Therefore, it could still not be properly recognized both by the employees and business organizations.
Finally, the international profile of the business company found really much below the total mean and simply, in the end of the list of determinants of organizational attractiveness, could be explained by the modernization of national companies adapting best international human resource practices, creating innovative and inclusive organizational cultures and employment experiences, making no difference of it being national or international.
All in all, creating a positive working environment, providing recognition and reward, involving and engaging employees and developing their skills and potential, giving feedback on their achievements and improvement could be a universal rule for the business companies attracting, keeping and motivating their employees.
More specifically, organizational attractiveness as an employer should be embedded in its employer brand and well-founded on the uniqueness, distinctiveness and authenticity of employment experience offered by the company to the existing and potential employees. It means that even though the study has identified a number of dimensions of organizational attractiveness of Lithuanian business companies as perceived by the existing employees as it was shown and discussed the above, the understanding, perception and manifestations of good working atmosphere or personal development or good relationship with supervisor may mean different things to different companies, it may have many names and faces. From the employee perspective different people choose and stay with companies for very different reasons, and are not sharing the same definition of 'success' (Marston, 2007).
Therefore, the main message for business companies is to use the knowledge about the drivers of organizational attractiveness as a guide, but not a pattern identifying and articulating the particular human resource practices employees can expect -from training, performance management, and compensation to rewards, promotion and communication. This would "guide the firm in selecting particular types of people with particular kinds of aptitudes and abilities to pursue particular goals in particular kinds of ways, motivated by particular kinds of rewards" (Baron, 2004), and would make them distinctive and attractive as an employer.