Family Friendliness Wins Over Potential Applicants?

Abstract

To be competitive and leverage their full innovative potential, organizations are in need to attract the best talents. Previous research indicates today’s young professionals highly appreciate family and work-life related benefits, and that signaling family friendliness (e.g., in job advertisements) increases potential applicants’ job pursuit intentions. However, why signaling family friendliness attracts applicants, and whether there are potential downsides and boundary conditions, has gained less attention in research so far. In this research, we investigate the mechanisms explaining effects of signaling family friendliness on job pursuit intentions. We suggest signaling family friendliness influences potential applicants’ perceptions of both the organization and potential coworkers, and that effects on potential applicants’ job pursuit intentions are dependent on their family and career role commitment. Our experiment (N = 382) overall supports our predictions: We find signaling family friendliness has a positive effect on job pursuit intentions via anticipated organizational support and justice, and via anticipated coworker cooperativeness; but a negative effect via anticipated coworker achievement-orientation. Participants’ family role commitment enhanced the positive effect via anticipated organizational support, whereas their career role commitment enhanced the negative effect via anticipated coworker achievement-orientation and diminished the positive effect via anticipated coworker cooperativeness. Interestingly, there was no effect via anticipated coworker competence, emphasizing that anticipated competence and achievement-orientation should be treated as distinct constructs. We discuss the implications of our results.