Development and Validation of a Brand Personality Scale for Employers of Healthcare Staff

ABSTRACT

This paper develops an instrument to measure the brand personality of employers in the healthcare sector. Focus group interviews, literature and internet searches were used to generate an initial item pool. Based on three online surveys among nursing staff, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and Rasch modeling were used for factor extraction, scale refinement, and scale evaluation. These analyses show that the employer brand personality can be operationalized as a higher-order construct with the dimensions of status, warmth, competence, and trustworthiness. In particular, these analyses confirm the reliability and validity of the delineated measurement instrument. Healthcare organizations from the public and nonprofit sector can thus use the measurement scale to assess their image as an employer as well as the effectiveness of their personnel marketing activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Scale development
• brand personality
• human resource management
• nonprofit hospitals
• nurses
• Rasch modeling

Acknowledgments

Authors would like to express gratitude to Careanesth (Zurich, Switzerland) for their support of data collection in the first study.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

We did not collect any health-related or other ethically sensitive data. We did not collect any data that would allow conclusions to be drawn about individual persons (e.g., email addresses, date of birth, or social security numbers). Furthermore, we recorded, for example, the age of the respondents using age categories. Therefore, no formal ethical scrutiny was required or undertaken. Each of the subjects was informed about the sponsor of the study, the content of the study, and the estimated duration of the survey. It was made clear that participation was voluntary and that the survey could be terminated at any time. A response to the questionnaire was interpreted as consent from participants.

Availability of data and materials

All data generated or analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Authors’ contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Julia Schätzle, Jörg Lindenmeier, Iris Saliterer and Florian Liberatore. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Julia Schätzle and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.