Exploring the Link between Corporate Branding and Employee Engagement: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

The idea of employee engagement is still alive after around two decades from its appearance in both management and psychology literature. Employee expectations around the world is changing and they expect a lot out of the working environment, that is, career-development, challenging work, leadership roles, global exposure and the list goes. Matching these desires calls for creation of a culture of engagement in the organization. Whereas, the concept of brands and branding, widely used as a marketing tool, are also not new to the firms. Developments in branding literature highlighted the applicability of branding from products and services to company and from company to entire corporation where involvement of all stakeholders became crucial. Branding in customer or marketing context is nothing but attracting, engaging and retaining existing and potential customers. The current study also tries to apply the same logic to existing and potential employees of an organization by reviewing the supporting literature. Thus, employee engagement in practice is seen as creating alignment with the organizations' goals and, particularly in the case of corporations, with the organization's brand. This has created a link between employee engagement and corporate branding, which argues for a closer alignment between the employees' values and those of the corporate brand. This paper therefore seeks to explore and demonstrate the link between the two concepts, i.e., corporate branding and employee engagement through developing a framework. Four bodies of literature, that is, employee engagement, corporate branding, internal branding, employer branding were considered for review. Selected papers were examined for the proposed framework in the study based on their implications that conceptualize the relationships between employee engagement and corporate branding. Furthermore, this exploratory study provides a solid platform for further research in this area.