How Organizational Structure Affects Recruitment: Benefit Corporations and Organizational Attractiveness
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Date
2019-05
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
In the past few years, there has been a rise of hybrid organizations, known as social enterprises or Benefit Corporations, that combine the organizational form of for-profit firms and the social objectives of non-profit organizations. These hybrid organizations allow companies to produce and maintain profits while pursuing social initiatives. Recent legislation has introduced “Benefit Corporations” as legal entities in 34 states. In addition to being viewed as socially responsible by stakeholders, a strong motivation for companies to become benefit corporations is to attract higher quality talent. To better understand a potential employee’s interest in these benefit corporations, a choice-based conjoint analysis was used to investigate the attributes graduating business students value when selecting a job offer, such as salary, size, legal form, and industry. Responses were modeled using a hierarchical multinomial logit model, and results show that when compared to jobs from both non-profit and for-profit organizations, students show a weak preference for benefit corporations with open-hiring policies and a strong preference for benefit corporations with either a donation-based structure or an environmental focus. In addition, the coefficients on control factors, specifically size and salary, align with expectations from previous research in the field. Further analysis was completed to include an investigation of the upper level of the model to determine minor differences across gender and major. Research in this field is fundamental to the expansion of benefit corporations, providing evidence of the return on investment from a focus on social mission and creating shared value.
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Keywords
Benefit Corporations, Recruiting, Social Responsibility, Human Resources, Social Enterprise