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The purpose of this paper is to extend research on employer branding in the recruitment context. The authors develop a model that integrates research from employer branding, social identity theory, and person-organization fit in order to investigate the impact of company reputation and identity congruency between organizations and their job applicants on the attractiveness of an employer brand.

An online survey was conducted to test the theoretical model in a recruitment context in the Norwegian offshore industry. Structural equation modelling is employed in the data analysis.

A key finding is that a company’s reputation and identity congruence between applicants’ self-identities and their perceived organization identity affect job applicants’ job pursuit intentions through mediation of cognitive social identity. Moreover, identity congruence predicts applicants’ cognitive identification with the company.

The study suggests that managers should try to map and understand central characteristics that describe job applicants’ identities and strive to provide applicants with access to necessary information about the company to form cognitive identification with the company.

The authors extend research on employer branding by incorporating social identity and attitude as mediators between symbolic and instrumental attributes of an employer brand and its attractiveness. This study also deepens research on social identity by including explicitly a comparison process between applicants’ self-identities and their perceived organizational identity, which leads to applicants’ identification with the company.

Past research argues that identity-linking messages must use established descriptors of the social group (i.e. prototypical identity appeals) to be effective. The authors show that less established descriptors (i.e. identity-linking messages low in prototypicality) can be optimal for an important customer segment, namely, for those that affectively identify with the social group. This is because of the distinct self-motives underlying the cognitive and affective social identity dimensions.

A pilot and two experimental studies were conducted, using gender and nationality as the target identities.

Consumers feel more hopeful and have higher purchase intention for products advertised using identity depictions that fit with their predominant (uncertainty-reduction or self-enhancement) self-motive. Consumers predominantly high in affective/cognitive social identity prefer identity-linking messages that are low/high in prototypicality. An abstract mindset reverses these effects by encouraging a similarity focus.

Future work should identify potential boundary conditions of the findings. Further, all studies use ascribed social groups. Future work should explore whether consumers relate differently to different social group, such as achieved groups, non-human groups or aspirational groups.

Adverts using established descriptors of a brand’s target social group may no longer fit the brand’s positioning. Understanding when and when not to use less established group descriptors to market brands is important for practitioners.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to explore the conditions under which priming consumers’ identity using less/more established (i.e. low/high in prototypicality) descriptors has a beneficial, or detrimental, effect on consumers’ purchase intention. In understanding these effects, the authors draw on consumers’ self-motives underlying cognitive and affective identification, a distinction not yet made in the identity-linking communications literature. The authors also explore the mediating role of hope – a central motivating emotion – in identity marketing.

The relationship between tourism development and its impacts on resident attitudes toward tourism has been widely discussed in literature. Not much attention, however, has been paid to residents’ role in tourism from the perspective of place identity theories. Based on a conceptual framework introduced by Palme, Koenig-Lewis, and Jones, this study applied the social identity theory in examining the relationship between resident’s place-based social identity and support for tourism. The results showed that both the cognitive and affective social identity components had significant effects on resident’s conative attitudes of support for tourism. What remains unsolved is which component is more significant and should be targeted in destination marketing. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed and recommended.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of interactive and social features on users' online experiences and their purchase intention of virtual goods from a social network site.

A banner with a hyperlink that connected to the author's web survey was posted on the homepage of Facebook. Of the 258 responses returned, 176 were fully completed. Measurement items were adapted from previous literature. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to evaluate the research model and hypotheses testing.

The results of an empirical study supported the use of the stimuli‐organism‐response (S‐O‐R) model in a social networking site and showed how environmental features should be incorporated to enhance users' online experiences and purchase intentions. Specifically, social identity showed the strongest influence on involvement and flow. More specifically, affective involvement showed the greatest influence on purchase intention compared to flow and cognitive involvement.

The relative importance of both interactivity and social identity in platform features in shaping consumers' online experiences should not be ignored. The author suggests online games or apps. Additionally, platform providers should advance social identity features that show a strong positive impact on users' online experiences.

With the proliferation of online social gaming, there is growing evidence for virtual goods consumption; however, relatively few studies have discussed this phenomenon. This paper draws on hypotheses from environmental psychology; specifically, users' intentions to purchase are modeled on user responses to the online stimuli of a Web platform and the online experience that such an environment elicits.

The research aims to explore the influence mechanism of peer feedback and users' knowledge contribution behavior. This study draws on the social identity theory and considers social identity as a mediating factor into the research framework.

This paper collected users' activity data of 142,191 ideas submitted by 76,647 users from the MIUI community between October 2010 and May 2018 via Python software, and data were processed using Stata 16.0.

The results indicate that knowledge feedback and social feedback positively influence users' knowledge contribution (quantity and quality), respectively. User's cognitive identity positively mediates the relationship between peer feedback and knowledge contribution behavior, affective identity positively mediates the relationship between peer feedback and knowledge contribution behavior, while evaluative identity positively mediates the relationship between peer feedback and knowledge contribution quality, but there is no mediating effect between peer feedback and knowledge contribution quantity.

This study advances knowledge management by highlighting peer feedback on online innovation communities. By demonstrating the significant mediating effect of social identity, this study empirically clarifies the relationships of peer feedback (knowledge feedback and social feedback) to specific dimensions of knowledge contribution, thereby providing managerial guidance to the online innovation community on incentivizing and managing user interaction to foster the innovation development of firms.

Because of the slow market growth of and intense competition among coffee shops, increasing brand preference and patronage intention is crucial in the coffee shop industry. Although place attachment theory (PAT) and social identity theory (SIT) stipulate that place attachment and social identity are key constructs of revisit intention, no studies have yet integrated the dimensions of SIT into PAT to predict place preference (PP) and repatronage intention (RI). In this study, the authors aimed to develop a theoretical model grounded in PAT and SIT to predict PP and RI.

A total of 648 coffee shop customers participated in an online survey, and their data were analyzed through structural equation modeling.

The results indicated that cognitive and affective place identity (PI) directly affected place dependence (PD) but did not directly affect PP. Cognitive PI also indirectly affected PD through affective PI. PD exerted a positive and significant effect on PP and thus affected RI.

These findings provide insights into the importance of cognitive and affective PI in shaping PD, PP and RI. From a place attachment perspective, the theoretical model enables coffee shop managers to cultivate strong PP to increase customer RI.

The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of online community user participation from a social influence perspective.

Based on 450 valid responses collected from a survey questionnaire, structural equation modeling (SEM) technology was employed to examine the research model.

The results show that both social identity and group norm have significant effects on user participation. In addition, group norm affects social identity. It was not possible to find the effect of subjective norm on participation intention.

This research is limited to a particular sample: students. Thus the results need to be generalized to other samples, such as working professionals.

Extant research has mainly focused on the effects of user motivations such as perceived usefulness, trust and commitment on online community user behavior, and seldom considered the effects of social processes including compliance, identification and internalization on user behavior. This research tries to fill the gap.

This chapter focuses on the importance of social media for pop culture fans. A web survey for fans of the Twilight Saga is implemented, using the concepts of cognitive, affective, and evaluative social identity and personal, product, and situational involvement. The purpose is to examine to what degree social identity and involvement can explain pop culture fans’ future intention to travel, make recommendations to others, and use social media. Findings show that pop culture fans use social media to a large extent and that these means are important for making decisions about traveling and event participation. Moreover, the chapter shows that involvement dimensions are more important than social identity dimensions to explain future intention to travel, to recommend to others, and to use social media.

This paper aims to investigate a new predictor of knowledge hiding, namely, employee perceptions of corporate hypocrisy (PCH). Based on the social cognitive theory, this study constructs a moderated mediation model linking PCH and knowledge hiding. The theoretical model concentrates on the mediating role of moral identity and the moderating role of organization-based self-esteem (OBSE).

Two studies with different samples and designs were used. In Study 1, the experimental method explored whether PCH could elicit knowledge hiding under the condition of OBSE (H1 and H4). Study 2, an empirical method with three stages, tested the full mediated moderation model by adding to the mediating role of moral identity (H1–H4).

The results showed: PCH was positively related to knowledge hiding, moral identity mediated the influence of PCH on knowledge hiding and OBSE not only moderated the relationship between PCH and moral identity but also moderated the indirect effect of PCH on knowledge hiding (via moral identity). The present research sheds valuable light on the processes (how) and contingencies (when) whereby PCH affects knowledge hiding for the first time, thus extending prior research and encouraging further explorations on the topic of PCH and knowledge hiding. It informs practitioners that taking measures to decrease corporate hypocrisy plays a vital role in preventing workers from hiding knowledge.

The study’s distinctive contribution is to examine the mediating effect of moral identity and the moderating role of OBSE on the relationship between corporate hypocrisy and knowledge hiding, which through the lens of social cognitive theory. Thus, it furthers a deeper understanding of knowledge hiding and helps the organization understand the dynamics of knowledge management, such as prohibiting employee counterproductive behaviors in the workplace.

Patient value co-creation represents a key research priority and an essential determinant of health care service outcomes. Yet few studies empirically examine the factors that motivate patients to participate actively in value co-creation. The purpose of this paper is to seek to identify the motivators of such activities in online health communities (OHC) and examine their specific and unique effects.

A netnographic study helps identify the motivators that drive patients’ value co-creation activities in OHCs. The combination of these results with social identity theories suggest the hypotheses; mediation analyses test the hypothesized model with data collected from eight OHCs that address both life-threatening and non-life-threatening illnesses.

The netnographic results show that social identity drives patients’ value co-creation activities. Interactions among OHC members and the cognitive resources of the OHC both contribute to the development of its social identity. Furthermore, benevolence trust, shared vision, and shared language determine how likely an OHC member is to identify with a particular OHC, which further influences his or her value co-creation activities in that OHC.

Although value co-creation is critical to the health care sector, few studies examine antecedents of patient value co-creation empirically. This study represents an initial attempt to do so by combining innovative netnographic analyses with mediation analyses.