Mind anchors and heart grips: the role of HRM and LMX in internal branding

Abstract

Internal branding strategies, as in"selling" an organization’s brand to employees so that they will "sell" it to external stakeholders, is a common way for practitioners to get employees to actively support organizational branding efforts. Scholars investigating how organizations best can facilitate such an employee brand support have largely ignored the role of HRM and leader-member exchange (LMX). To test for this data from a survey among Norwegian hospital employees were analyzed. As hypothesized, we found positive relationships between high-commitment HRM and LMX and three manifestations of employee brand support, namely reputation strategy embeddedness, brand-congruent behaviour, and brand development participation. Organizational commitment mediated all the relationships. Examining HRM and LMX simultaneously, we found that LMX moderated the relationship between high-commitment HRM and reputation strategy embeddedness. Theoretical and practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2021.1931407 .

Keywords:

• HRM
• management
• leadership
• internal branding
• brand support

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Dag Yngve Dahle, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 If presented as a proportion, this would have been stated as percent of the total effect, e.g. 16 percent.