Environmental concern as an important value in the choice of organisation in the South African context.

• Main Author: Bush, Judy F.
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Environmental concern; Choice of organisation
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10539/11649

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.