The role of Employee Well-Being in Internal Brand Management: An exploratory

study in a restaurant chain

Abstract

Brand-driven hospitality organizations use Internal Brand Management (IBM) practices to

recruit, train, lead and motivate service employees to deliver brand-aligned customer experiences.

To date, IBM research has not explicitly considered employee well-being (EWB) as a necessary

antecedent of such employee performance. Using organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) to

operationalize EWB, we test the strength of the relationship between OBSE and pro-brand

motivation in a chain of restaurants. As drivers of OBSE we use employee-perceived brand-

values fit and relationship orientation. We found a significant positive relationship between

OBSE and motivation, suggesting that EWB must not be overlooked in IBM programs.

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INTRODUCTION

In recent years, service organizations, including those in the hospitality industry, have become

more aware of the importance of training and motivating their employees so they are able and

willing to deliver the brand promise to customers (King, 2010). In a crowded marketplace, with

highly informed consumers, a compelling and differentiated brand experience is one of the

building blocks of sustainable competitive advantage. In pursuing this goal, the literature on

Internal Brand Management (IBM) has studied the antecedents of employees’ brand knowledge,

understanding and commitment (e.g. Burman et al., 2009; King & Grace, 2012). More recently,

IBM research has sought to examine the motivational drivers that inform employees’ brand-

supportive behavior (e.g. Xiong & King, 2015).

A more established stream of research, which has recently regained traction in the literature, is

the notion of employee well-being (EWB) (Grant et al., 2007), as a precursor to employee

performance (e.g. Schneider & Bowen, 1993; Spector, 1997; Wright & Cropanzano, 2000).

Companies that pursue EWB are recognized in trade publications, such as Fortune's 100 Best

Companies to Work For (Hinkin & Tracey, 2010), and steadfastly maintain that as a result they

get outstanding performance from their employees (Manjoo, 2013), a claim that has received

empirical support (e.g. Fulmer et al., 2003).This research stream is particularly relevant in

hospitality settings where front-line roles are characterized by intensive emotional labor, which

can lead to negative EWB outcomes, such as burnout (Pienaar & Willemse, 2008; Kim, 2008).

Surprisingly though, despite IBM research seeking to enhance employee brand performance,

particularly in high contact service industries such as hospitality, the literature has failed to

consider the role that EWB plays in enabling employees' brand-supportive behavior. Since this

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involves extra-role behavior that is not prescribed in a job description, but is nonetheless

important for organizational success (Morhart et al., 2009), investigation of such a concept has

intuitive appeal. This study takes a first step in that direction by focusing on a strong EWB

correlate, specifically organization-based self-esteem (Bowling et al., 2010), and examining to

what extent it plays a role as an antecedent of pro-brand motivation.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) is defined as the degree to which individuals believe

themselves to be capable, significant, and worthy as organizational members (Pierce & Gardner,

2004). Research has shown that OBSE is associated with important outcomes for organizations,

such as organizational commitment, identification, citizenship behavior and performance (Pierce

& Gardner, 2004). Furthermore, Bowling et al. (2010) found strong meta-analytical correlations

between OBSE and indicators of EWB such as job satisfaction (0.57), depression (-0.51) and

physical symptoms (-0.28). This suggests that companies should strive to build a healthy OBSE

among their employees, keeping in mind that OBSE is part of an employee’s global self-esteem,

specifically the part that is organization-based. Hence, unlike self-efficacy, OBSE is organization

contingent, its main drivers are under the control of management, and they must be actively

deployed for the employee to develop a healthy OBSE.

A key driver of OBSE are the signals sent to employees by organizational structures that imply

evaluations of their competence and trustworthiness. Within IBM literature, a previously studied

construct that can perform this function is relationship orientation. Defined as “the extent to

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which the organization exhibits positive behaviors towards employees (e.g. shows respect, is

cooperative, communicates well, is trustworthy, encourages working towards a common goal)”

(King & Grace, 2012, p. 474), relationship orientation reflects the human side of the organization

that is considered important beyond merely productive employee/employer relationships. From

this perspective, the construct is based on the principles of internal relationship marketing, which

suggest that motivation can be enhanced when the organization creates an environment that

emphasizes positive relationships with employees (Schweitzer & Lyons, 2008; Back et al. 2011).

Relationship orientation comprises an organic set of humanistic management practices that foster

respect, communication, shared goals, cooperation and trust in management. These positive

behaviors by the organization signal to employees that they are valued and trustworthy

organizational members, hence building their OBSE. Therefore we hypothesize:

H1 Relationship orientation is positively related to OBSE

While relationship orientation is a direct signal sent to employees, an indirect organizational

signal that informs employee perceptions of themselves is the hospitality brand. According to

Schneider’s (1987) Attraction, Selection and Attrition (ASA) framework, employees are attracted

to, and selected by, organizations whose members are similar to themselves and, over time, those

that don’t fit will leave. Within a hospitality context, the hospitality brand is largely a result of

the individuals that work there given that the product being sold is a service experience. As such,

drawing on the propositions advanced in the ASA framework, IBM research considers employee

brand values fit to be an important brand behavior contributor. Defined as the extent to which

employees perceive a congruence between their personal values and the values of the brand

(Yaniv & Farkas, 2005; Harris & de Chernatony, 2001), brand values fit has been linked to
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organizational identification, customer orientation and brand-building behaviors (Löhndorf &

Diamantopoulos, 2014; Xiong & King, 2015). In brand-driven organizations, leaders, training

and IBM programs are constantly reminding employees of the brand values, and underscoring

their importance. To the extent that brand values fit is high, these organizational signals will

strengthen employees' OBSE because the brand values they acclaim match employees' own

personal values. Hence:

H2 Brand values fit is positively related to OBSE

As mentioned earlier, OBSE is behind important organizational outcomes, including affective

commitment and citizenship behavior. From this perspective, we hypothesize that OBSE also

relates to employees’ pro-brand motivation. For employees with high OBSE, championing a

brand that is encouraged by the organization, affords an opportunity to enhance their own self-

esteem (Korman, 2001). Therefore these employees will be motivated to actually undertake

brand-supportive behaviors. By contrast, employees who score low on OBSE lack confidence in

their own ability to succeed, and engage in self-esteem “damage control” by withholding effort.

This voluntary lack of effort becomes the justification for their low performance, which for them

is preferable to facing their own personal inadequacy (Korman, 2001). Therefore, employees with

low OBSE will have lower motivation to undertake brand supportive behaviors. Thus we

hypothesize:

H3 OBSE is positively related to pro-brand motivation.

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In addition, consistent with Xiong and King (2015), we view brand values fit as directly related

to pro-brand motivation. Similar to consumers who purchase branded items to reinforce their

self-image, employees whose personal values match the values of the corporate brand are likely

to feel that working in this organization reinforces their image. Hence, they are strongly

motivated to contribute to the success of the brand, which they see as embodying their own

personal values. This leads to our final hypothesis:

H4 Brand values fit is positively related to pro-brand motivation.

Figure 1 shows our hypothesized structural model.

METHODS

The research took place in a Mexico City restaurant chain with a strong brand culture. The chain

has 9 wholly-owned branches under a single management and training regime, with total

headcount exceeding four hundred. The company has a policy of hiring mostly women, and

offers training and career opportunities to foster retention. Moreover the owners adhere to a

humanistic management philosophy which includes many of the practices of relationship

orientation. In fact, given the modest socioeconomic status of most of their employees, the

owners spontaneously mentioned self-esteem as a concern during their first meeting with the

researchers.

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We used previously published scales for all constructs: OBSE was measured with the 10-item

scale introduced by Pierce et al. (1989), relationship orientation with the 9-item scale introduced

by King & Grace (2012), brand-values fit and pro-brand motivation with the 3- and 4-item scales

proposed by Xiong & King (2015). Scales were translated to Spanish following a team approach

(Harkness, 2003), which involved two professional translators, plus the lead researcher, who is

fully bilingual, and an outside marketing academic doing the back-translation (Brislin, 1970).

Translated items were vetted by the restaurant owners and the HR manager to make sure

employees would have no difficulty with item wording. All items were rated on a 7-point Likert

scale.

Data collection took place during November-December 2016 with the help of HR staff. The

survey instrument was hosted on a professional online platform (Qualtrics), and employees

answered on their cell phone or on a computer. Due to strong owner interest in the study, all

employees were asked to take the survey, albeit anonymously and with strong promises of

confidentiality (only aggregate results were shared with management). We collected 266 valid

surveys from the nine restaurants (we did not include personnel from the production and

distribution center, nor administrative staff).

Despite having a good sample size, SPSS analysis of kurtosis and skewness indicated violation of

multivariate normality, which suggested using Partial Least Squares (PLS) rather than

covariance-based SEM for the estimation of the structural model (Hair et al., 2012). However, a

more important reason is that our model focuses on exploring previously untested relationships

between constructs. Hence statistical power is a priority, to avoid prematurely rejecting candidate

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constructs, and since PLS has power greater than or equal to SEM, it is the preferred choice

(Reinartz et al., 2009).

Using SmartPLS version 2.0 (Ringle et al., 2005), we first evaluated the measurement or outer

model. Table 1 shows the items, item loadings, alphas and composite reliabilities. All items had

acceptable loadings, and composite reliabilities are well above 0.70 indicating good internal

consistency (Bagozzi & Yi, 1988). However, when we checked the cross loadings of the

indicators, which provide a complementary test for discriminant validity at the indicator level

(Henseler et al., 2009), we found that items RO-8 and RO-9 cross-loaded on the scale for OBSE,

which led us to discard these two items.

Table 2 shows the average variance extracted (AVE), square root of the AVE (in bold on the

main diagonal) and inter-construct correlations. All AVE values are well above 0.50 which

indicates good convergent validity (Bagozzi & Yi, 1988). Furthermore, complying with the

Fornell-Larcker criterion, each of the elements on the main diagonal is greater than the respective

row and column off-diagonal elements, which indicates adequate discriminant validity at the

construct level (Hulland, 1999; Henseler et al., 2009). In sum, the measurement model displays

adequate indicator and internal consistency reliability, as well as convergent and discriminant

validity. The structural model with estimated path coefficients and t-values is displayed in Figure

2. We calculated t-values using the bootstrapping procedure in SmartPLS with 5000 samples.

The estimated model confirmed that all of the hypothesized relationships between the constructs

had the expected signs, and were significant at the 1% level. Furthermore, the model explains

most of the variance of the two dependent variables: brand-values fit and relationship orientation

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together account for 59% of the variance of OBSE, whereas fit and OBSE explain 56% of the

variance of pro-brand motivation.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS

This study revealed a robust empirical link between hospitality employees’ OBSE and brand

motivation, thereby making the case that EWB is a condition for brand promise delivery in

hospitality organizations, and thus deserving of management’s attention.

This conclusion stands against the backdrop of current trends in hospitality that pose threats to

EWB, such as automation and outsourcing (Kokkinou & Cranage, 2013, Zoghbi-Manrique-de-

Lara et al., 2016). These cost-cutting measures are often adopted to increase efficiency and

improve profits, but they can bring about negative consequences among employees, such as

perceptions of job insecurity and even deviant behavior (Zoghbi-Manrique-de-Lara et al., 2016).

Since job insecurity is a subjectively experienced stressor, it has a negative impact on EWB

(Sverke & Hellgren, 2002). Outsourcing practices can also be perceived as breaches of the

psychological contract, which have been shown to negatively affect OBSE (Gardner et al., 2015).

It is an inescapable reality that since the Great Recession, employees easily mistrust

organizations and fear for their jobs. Just as 2017 got under way, business news prominently

featured the hundreds of store closings that were planned for this year by prestigious retailer

brands such as Macy's, Sears, Kmart, The Limited and JCPenney (Timmermann, 2017). For its

part, the hospitality industry is increasingly being disrupted by new entrants from the sharing

economy, such as Airbnb (Zervas et al., 2014), and hospitality employees are not ignorant about

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these trends. Therefore, HR managers within hospitality must be sensitive to employees'

perceptions of job insecurity and the impact these perceptions can have on EWB and on brand

motivation.

Our finding that brand values fit is positively related to OBSE is rich with implications. First,

previous arguments for brand fit were mostly about improving service quality, but our results

show that EWB is also at stake and in a very positive way. Assuming employees have good fit

the brand can actually enhance workers lives because organizational IBM programs that celebrate

the brand values will automatically reinforce employee OBSE, and therefore EWB.

Second, since a hospitality brand is all about a particular customer experience, it cannot be

enacted just with hard-working, conscientious employees. To the extent the brand is distinctive

and differentiated, with a particular set of values, it takes employees who authentically share

those values to effectively enact the desired customer experience. When both set of values are

closely aligned, our model shows that employees' self-esteem, and hence well-being, is enhanced.

Employees' service performance is then more authentic and deeply satisfying because it springs

from personal values that match the brand's.

It is for these reasons that HR managers must take values-based recruitment so seriously.

Recruitment to guarantee high levels of brand-values fit among all employees ultimately results

in service performances that are deeply aligned with the brand, making both customers and

employees happy. And in a sense, these service performances become effortless because they

come from employees' own personal values. The unscripted, fun-loving employees of Southwest

Airlines provide one well-known example.

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Having hired employees who share the brand's values, the hospitality organization also needs

excellent people management practices, which here we modelled with relationship orientation.

This organic set of humanistic management practices includes respect, communication,

cooperation, shared goals, trust in management and the perception of being treated as a human

being. It is easy to see how these actions of management, when consistently carried out, will

signal to employees that the organization holds them in high regard, thereby enhancing their

OBSE and EWB. Indeed, our model found that relationship orientation had a strong direct effect

on OBSE, with a path coefficient of 0.542.

Our model finds a substantial direct effect of OBSE on pro-brand motivation, a previously

untested link within IBM literature. Moreover, our results contribute incrementally to past studies

by showing how OBSE partially mediates the effect of brand-values fit on pro-brand motivation,

which has been identified as a driver of brand performance (Xiong & King, 2015).

Finally, the limitations of the study include our sample being all-female, and from a single

organization in the restaurant sector, which means care must be taken to generalize results.

Word count: 2474

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 Figure 1: Theoretical model

Figure 2: Structural model results

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Table 1: Items, item loadings, Cronbach alphas and composite reliabilities
Loading Alpha CR
Pro-brand motivation 0.934 0.953
Introduction question: Why are you motivated to work?
Because I care about benefiting my restaurant’s brand 0.8764
BRMOT-1
through my work
Because I want to help my restaurant’s brand through 0.9154
BRMOT-2
my work
Because I want to have a positive impact on my 0.9325
BRMOT-3
restaurant’s brand
Because it is important to me to do good for my 0.9295
BRMOT-4
restaurant’s brand through my work
Brand values fit 0.829 0.898
The reason I prefer this restaurant's brand to others is 0.8173
FIT-1
because of what it stands for, its values
My values are similar to those represented by the 0.8969
FIT-2
restaurant's brand
What this restaurant's brand stands for is important to 0.8739
FIT-3
me
Organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) 0.939 0.949
OBSE-1 I am taken seriously 0.8204
OBSE-2 I count around here 0.8945
OBSE-3 I am important 0.9099
OBSE-4 I am trusted 0.8721
OBSE-5 I can make a difference 0.7983
OBSE-6 There is faith in me 0.9014
OBSE-7 I am valuable 0.8365
OBSE-8 I am helpful 0.7131
OBSE-9 I am efficient 0.6220
OBSE-10 I am cooperative 0.6557
Relationship orientation 0.918 0.935
I feel that I am a respected and valued member of the 0.8619
RO-1
organization I work for
I feel that I can trust the management of the 0.8196
RO-2
organization I work for
Overall, I would suggest excellent communication 0.8207
RO-3
exists within the organisation I work for
I feel that the organization I work for trusts me to do a 0.8100
RO-4
good job
I feel that a good deal of cooperation exists between 0.8167
RO-5 management and the employees of the organization I
work for
I feel that the organization I work for treats me like a 0.8835
RO-6
human being
The organization I work for has a clear set of goals and 0.7210
RO-7
values which everyone is pursuing together to achieve

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Table 2: Average variance extracted and inter-construct correlations
Construct AVE BR-FIT BR-MOT OBSE REL-O
BR-FIT 0.7454 0.8634
BR-MOT 0.8349 0.71 0.9137
OBSE 0.6537 0.599 0.6112 0.8085
REL-O 0.6731 0.4491 0.406 0.7016 0.8204

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