Environmental concern as an important value in the choice of organisation in the South African context.
Date
2012-07-10
Authors
Bush, Judy F.
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Abstract
Employer attractiveness is defined as the envisioned benefits that a potential employee sees
in working for a specific organisation (Berthon, Ewing and Hah, 2005). Attracting
employees with superior skills and knowledge comprises an important source of competitive
advantage. Added to this, young workers are now looking to work for organisations that do
not harm the environment. This study attempted to validate an existing scale, the Employer
Attractiveness Scale (EmpAt), and extend this scale to include a new self-developed ‘green’
value subscale to measure the importance that a sample of second-to-last and final year
university students (N = 276) placed on various values, when choosing an organisation for
which to work. The environmental consciousness of the sample of students was thus
investigated. The likelihood of finding a job in the ideal organisation was also investigated.
The results indicated that the current sample was indeed environmentally conscious on two
different ecological scales, including the self-developed green subscale of the new revised
EmpAt, and that the likelihood of finding a job in an ideal organisation was indeed
considered likely in the current South African context. Significant differences were found
between race and gender groups. The Employer Attractiveness scale retained most of its
original factorial structure providing validity to the scale, with the green subscale loading as
the main factor.
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Keywords
Environmental concern, Choice of organisation