2.1. Employer Brand Attributes Congruence and Employee Creativity: Mediation of Career Satisfaction
As a part of the broader multidimensional construct of organizational image [
21], the employer brand is the image of an organization in the labor market, reflected as the package of functional, economic, and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the employing company [
2]. The discussion of the construct and dimensions of employer brand has never stopped, and the most widely accepted classification is an instrumental–symbolic framework. Instrumental attributes describe the job or the organization in terms of objective, concrete, and factual attributes to maximize employees’ benefits and minimize their costs [
4], e.g., pay, advancement, job security, and task demands. Employees’ attraction to a company cannot be explained solely based on explicit elements, but also in terms of the symbolic traits and meanings related to person–organization fit, and personality-like terms (e.g., innovativeness, prestige). Symbolic attributes are associated with employees maintaining, enhancing, and expressing their self-image [
4]. Since there are dual determining factors in employer brand proposition, an important goal is to evaluate the joint impact of the two dimensions in this regard.
Designing and implementing an HRM system that supports and stimulates employee creative thinking becomes the primary goal for obtaining an organizational competitive advantage, since individual novel ideas can serve as the cornerstone of organizational innovation, transformation, and competition [
22]. Creativity refers to the generation of novel and useful ideas concerning products, services, and work methods, which is the most crucial session in all stages of innovation and is the foundation of the process of implementation and assessment [
16,
23]. However, previous studies have suffered from inadequate theoretical considerations and divergent empirical findings in terms of the effect of employer brand on proactive behaviors, such as creativity [
24,
25]. As mentioned before, we attribute these issues to the negligence of employer brand attributes congruence.
According to social information processing theory (SIP) [
26], the influence and construction of job, task, team, or organizational characteristics, as social information, has an impact on individual creativity through the process of evaluation and choice [
27]. On the one hand, the objective characteristics of the task [
27] contribute to employee creativity. For instance, modest or relaxed job content and structure [
28] allow employees time and energy to generate creative ideas [
29]. Similarly, autonomous work [
30] urges employees to proactively identify task challenges and explore alternative possibilities through unorthodox approaches, thus promoting set-breaking and experimental behaviors [
31]. On the other hand, an organization’s innovative atmosphere, climate, and environment [
32,
33] encourage employees to work creatively [
22]. Overall, both instrumental and symbolic attributes of employer brand are crucial for predicting employee creativity. However, it is not only the content of employer brand that is principal, but also the configuration characteristics of both attributes.
CCT identifies the characteristics of social information. CCT believes that one cue may interact with the effect of the other [
34]. Individuals detect cues to make evaluations and tend to maintain consistent patterns among multiple cognitive elements; when the detected cues are consistent, they are more likely to be used jointly in evaluation [
35], and the cues will support each other because the latter cue will fit with pre-existing thinking patterns or expectations [
36]. However, inconsistent cues will weaken the effectiveness of each other and even cause individuals to focus on the discrepancy or negative cues, which negatively influences individuals’ subsequent evaluations [
34,
35]. Incongruent information is salient [
37] and easy to recall and reconstruct in a retrospective process [
8,
26], thus some individuals will be distracted by negative cues when multiple cues provide disparate conclusions [
35]. That is, inconsistent employer brand attributes may cause individuals to focus on divergent or negative cues, thereby negatively impacting cognitive or decision-making processes.
We believe that consistent contextual cues are particularly critical for regulating employees’ attitudes and behaviors, especially for those who are less proactive. This is because strong instrumental attributes and strong symbolic attributes indicate consistent managerial cues, and employees who are motivated and inspired by an organization’s innovative climate also have access to resources to support their creative thinking as well. In the same vein, the organization will not set inappropriate goals or expectations (weak symbolic attributes) for employees who lack supportive resources (weak instrumental attributes). In contrast, if the supply of resources is scarce but the organization’s innovative climate and culture are strong (weak instrumental attributes–strong symbolic attributes), the employees might be forced to generate creative ideas and have a sense of under-qualification and powerlessness, because the instrumental attributes fail to prompt employees’ innovative ideas. Similarly, if the organization provides employees with sufficient instrumental resources while being weak in creating a creative atmosphere (strong instrumental attributes–weak symbolic attributes), employees will lack the consciousness and motivation needed for creativity. Formally, we summarize this pattern in the following hypothesis:
H1a. Employer brand attributes congruence is positively related to employee creativity.
Furthermore, we compare different configurations of instrumental and symbolic attributes along the (in)congruence line. First, we predict that the level of employer brand attributes congruence is positively related to employee creativity, considering that both instrumental and symbolic attributes are boosters of employee creativity. Second, we also postulate that instrumental attributes may play a major role in explaining employees’ career satisfaction and creativity. One reason for this is that current employees put more weight on the expression of instrumental attributes, which means more sufficient and effective information or resources. Another reason is instrumental attributes are more objective, authentic, and verifiable than symbolic ones [
34]; the former is reflected in tangible task content, compensation and benefits, etc., which is the ‘inside’ of HRM practice, while the latter is more displayed in the intangible organizational culture or climate, which is the ‘face’ of an organization. Employees are more pragmatic and hold the view of ‘seeing is believing’, so we propose the following hypotheses:
H1b. Employees will display more creativity in the context of a strong instrumental–strong symbolic employer brand strategy than in the context of a weak instrumental–weak symbolic employer brand strategy.
H1c. Employees will display more creativity in the context of a strong instrumental–weak symbolic employer brand strategy than in the context of a weak instrumental–strong symbolic employer brand strategy.
However, it should be noted that the direct effects of organizational context operate through other unmeasured individual-level variables [
32]. We regard career satisfaction as an essential mechanism in the process of work and organizational factors strengthening individual work behaviors under the background of boundaryless careers. Career satisfaction refers to people’s satisfaction with how their career evolves and progresses over time, which is not confined to one job or one organization [
38]. The satisfaction of an employee is based on the likelihood that they benefit from invested resources in return [
39]. Support from the organization could improve employees’ career satisfaction [
40] by strengthening employees’ subjective judgment of demands [
41,
42], such as compensation, job autonomy, promotion, work–life balance [
43,
44], etc. Additionally, employees pay more attention to individual value and are much more self-directed when searching for jobs in a boundaryless context; they tend to measure career progress in line with their goals, values, and preferences [
20], such as organizational climate, leadership style [
41], etc. We regard career satisfaction as the mediator for several reasons: (a) career satisfaction, as an individual emotional judgment, is one of the well-established indicators linking career characteristics and career behaviors [
38], (b) it is a key pre-condition of employees’ creative thinking, as one can invest time and energy only if they are satisfied with fundamental demands, (c) and it is a vital concern for managers before paying attention on employees’ motivation and ability to create.
In addition, the congruence of employer brand attributes is quite important when contributing to individuals’ cognition and evaluations [
35]. It is not just the content of employer brand attributes that matters, it is the coordination between the two attributes. The two attributes complement and support each other—instrumental attributes are the carrier of symbolic attributes, while symbolic attributes provide a strong atmosphere and perception for instrumental attributes [
39]. According to CCT, one cue may interact with and support the effect of the other [
34]. The consistency between employer value propositions and the practical supply of demanded resources gives employees faith in not only their current job but also the prospects of their career. The principal reason for this is that a consistent employer brand indicates that the organization does (supports resources) as it declares (claims value and culture), which can enhance the employee’s judgment of their career.
Moreover, proactive behaviors are one of the pivotal consequences that career satisfaction achieves [
20]. This paper argues that the improvement of career satisfaction can increase employees’ active innovation behavior for two reasons. First, as far as the employees themselves are concerned, employees who are satisfied with their career development have the ability and motivation to proactively generate and conduct creative ideas [
15]. On the one hand, satisfied employees will have a sense of goal achievement and great ease in their careers [
45]. Thus, they are able to contribute more to regulate themselves and engage in the organization, owing to sufficient resources (both perceptual and actual resources). On the other hand, satisfied employees are more willing to go further and achieve higher goals due to a sense of accomplishment [
46]. For example, they are motivated to perform positively and implement extra-role and discretionary behaviors (such as creativity) beyond work regulations, which is beneficial to the thriving of their career. Second, career satisfaction implies a supportive and encouraging atmosphere in the organization, which is a key factor in improving creativity [
47,
48,
49]. Previous research has also confirmed the relationships between satisfaction and stronger creative performance [
49]. Collectively, we propose Hypothesis 2:
H2. Career satisfaction mediates the relationship between employer brand attributes congruence and employee creativity.
2.2. Employer Brand Attributes Congruence and Employee Creativity: Moderation of Proactive Personality
As explained before, consistent cues are particularly useful for employees with less proactive personalities who rely on external cues for behavioral guidance [
9]. By the same token, we argue that the proactive personality is related to information processing patterns. SIP asserts that the method [
35] and extensiveness [
8] of perception, judgment, and processing are affected by the motivation of information processing [
18]. A proactive personality is a work-related and motivational resource, state, or process [
50,
51] that drives individuals to regulate their surroundings rather than sticking to the status quo and being resigned to life as it is [
51,
52,
53]. Individuals with different levels of proactive personality could process employer brand information heuristically or systematically according to SIP [
54]. Systematic processing considers all informational inputs for their relevance, especially their details, for the decision which makes the assessment and scrutinization more comprehensive and analytic; meanwhile, heuristic processing takes a subset of available information into account and focuses on the simple principle to save effort and capacity and formulates the judgments quickly and efficiently [
8].
We argue that individuals with lower levels of proactive personality are better at processing congruent employer brand messages according to SIP. The main reason is that less proactive people tend to make less effort when judging and processing social information [
8,
55]. They would turn to heuristic cues which are easy to access, that is, source characteristics (such as the congruence of multiple messages, credibility, and likability), rather than massage characteristics (e.g., amount, comprehensibility, and the validity of persuasive argumentation) [
54]. The cues of congruent employer brand attributes are perceived to be reliable by employees [
34], which can be extrapolated to an employer’s trustworthy image. Instead, when cues present inconsistent signals, employees focus on the negative cue and anchor their perceptions of quality accordingly because of the strong salience and diagnosability of negative information [
37].
More interestingly, proactive personality or other similar motivations will moderate the negative effects of inconsistent information [
8]. On the one hand, SIP labels this desired level of confidence as the sufficiency threshold, which varies according to dispositional factors and individual characteristics. Individuals will continue processing systematically when actual confidence lags back behind the threshold [
8]. Proactive individuals hold higher thresholds, so that the gaps between actual confidence and expected confidence divide, which stimulates the potential of employees and promotes their systematic information processing. On the other hand, the discrepancy between employer brand attributes brings about a mismatch in expectations or cognitive schemata [
36], which charges more effort from receivers to distinguish the information as well as relieve discomfort [
55]. Proactive people are characterized as engaging in situations, showing initiative, and persevering to optimize undesirability context [
53,
56]; the urgent motivation of continuous improvement [
53] helps to promote proactive individuals to actively alleviate and overcome inconsistent employer brand attributes. In addition, proactive individuals are not sensitive to the congruence of employer brand attributes owing to self-serving bias [
57]; they attribute career success to personal characteristics [
58] rather than their external environment (such as employer brand strategies and other HRM practices). Together, we propose the following hypotheses:
H3. Proactive personality moderates the direct effect between employer brand attributes congruence and employee creativity. Specifically, low-level proactive personality strengthens the positive impact of employer brand attributes congruence on employee creativity, and high-level proactive personality alleviates the negative impact of employer brand attributes incongruence on employee creativity.
H4. Proactive personality moderates the indirect effect between employer brand attributes congruence and employee creativity. Specifically, low-level proactive personality strengthens the positive impact of employer brand attributes congruence on employee creativity via career satisfaction, and high-level proactive personality alleviates the negative impact of employer brand attributes incongruence on employee creativity via career satisfaction.