Strategic Talent Management: The Impact of Employer Branding on the Affective Commitment of Employees

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper aims to evaluate the relationship between employer branding strategies implemented by organizations, and their impact on the affective commitment of employees. The paper claims to use a quantitative and quantitative research methods and semi-structured interviews. First, the introduction needs to properly highlight the research gap in relation to employer branding and AOC and to list research objectives highlighting how the authors plan to address the gaps identified in the literature. Research questions have to be presented in the introduction along with a brief description of the research approach to be adopted in the paper. While research gaps have been highlighted to a certain extent, the authors do not pose any research question or objectives in the current version of their paper. Moreover, the authors have to further explore the literature on talent management in different fields as the concept has been studied from different perspectives according to the focus of each field (HRM, OB, etc.). Reworking the research gaps is essential to justify theoretical contribution.

Second, the authors posed research hypotheses in complete disconnection with existing literature. All research hypotheses need to be built on existing literature as the authors are trying to theoretically and empirically expand it. Hypotheses as well as research questions cannot be presented in the methodology section. Hence, the literature review and methodology sections have to be completely reworked. Third, the authors don't clearly explain how they selected the companies and respondents in their sample. The sector of activity might be very relevant in studies on EB and AOC. Moreover, there is no mention of how the different variables in the model were constructed and measured, and how they are defined. This is a fundamental issue that authors need to address as it affects the credibility of their entire research. Fourth, the authors claim that they used qualitative research and that they have conducted semi-structured interviews. There is no mention of these in the entire paper. Who did they interview? What were the outcomes obtained from these interviews as to whether they support or contradict the results of the quantitative analysis conducted? Fifth, there is no discussion of the study's results in light of existing literature. How did the results confirm or contradict the existing literature? Sixth, more needs to be said about the theoretical and empirical contribution of the paper. The conclusion section highlighting the contributions of the research (theoretical and empirical) as well as the theoretical implications of the study and the implications for managers are very weak and need to be completely revised and expanded. The paper's theoretical and empirical contributions are very limited and do not warrant publication at this point. 

Author Response

Comments and suggestions have been considered and improved as resquested.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article deals with important and current issues and is written with methodological rigor, however, the authors may reflect on the following issues:

1. Taking into account the growing importance of the discussed issues highlighted in the article, the authors may take into account the refreshment of the literature used, because more than half (24 out of 47) were published more than 10 years ago.
2. In the literature review in point 2.3, contrary to what the subtitle suggests, the focus was solely on defining talent and talent management, ignoring the importance of employer branding in building employee engagement. Authors may consider supplementing this passage with what is accepted as the title of this section

Author Response

Comments and suggestions have been considered and improved as requested.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In my opinion, paper is focused on very interesting topic concentrating to human resources management and talents. Objectives are ambitious and methods adequate to the nature of research. Structure of the paper is clear. The results of the research seem to me very interesting for the scientists and also for managers in companies. Nevertheless, I have some recommendations to improve the quality of the paper.

In the introduction and literature review, try to focus on talent management process and especially on retention in more extended way (f.e. Collins et al. 2020, Egerova et al. 2015; Kontoghiorghes & Frangou,2009; Li et al., 2018….). Authors should include to this part also the main factors that influence talent management process (Morley et al. 2015; Festing et al. 2013; Savov et al., 2020, Stahl et al. 2012; Vaiman et al. 2012 …).

I appreciate that hypothesis are based on previous researches. Hypothesis are described but I suggest to make a list of specific hypothesis in the part of methodology because I think they are written too generally. F.e. each of sociodemographic factor deserves own hypothesis to be written in this part.

Methods used in the research and methodology process are adequate but should be more explained in the part of methodology. Authors should explain more why non-parametric tests are used (they can add also test of normality – and if possible use parametric tests to obtain robust results). I appreciate that authors calculated the validity of the parts of questionnaire. Authors should write down more about the items of the questionnaire. Was there Likert scale used to measure these items or something else? How did you calculate dimensions of EB and AOC? You are also talk about regression model, but it is not explained in the methodology and some other test (f.e. KMO) are not mentioned. Please, correct it.

In the main art of results, I suggest to join chapters 4.1-4.4 join into one bigger chapter. Table 7 should be substantiated and verified by numbers from tests. Paper contains a lot of practical implications of the research and if possible I suggest to extend the chapter 6 managerial contribution to get higher impact of the research in the practice area.

Genarally, I like this paper and I reccomend it to publish after these changes.

Author Response

Comments and suggestions have been considered and improved as requested.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

1- The introduction needs to further emphasize the research gap and the objectives of the study. The structure of the paper has to be delineated at the end of the introduction.

2- The literature review needs to be more concise and compact. It shouldn't simply list what each study concluded but should revolve around clear themes that are relevant to the study. The literature needs to highlight the state of knowledge reached in the field, where authors agree, where they disagree, and contrast these agreements and disagreements. More integration is needed to reflect that.

3- The hypotheses cannot be derived out of nowhere and listed altogether. The conceptual model needs to be based on the relevant literature and every hypothesis has to have a certain conceptual ground. The authors cannot discuss the tests to be performed as they pose their hypotheses. The authors should refer to other quality papers published in the field and follow a similar structure.

4-  More needs to be said about the sample selection and the characteristics of companies/respondents. Did the authors target specific industries? Companies of different sizes? What were the criteria for selection? What was the response rate? How many questionnaires were considered valid? 

5- The results section is rambling and needs to be presented in a more concise manner highlighting which hypotheses are overall confirmed and which ones are not. A discussion of how this is aligned with the study's conceptual model needs to follow. Moreover, the authors need to discuss how their results confirm or add to previous lead studies in the field.

6- Theoretical and practical implications need to be discussed separately from the conclusions. The managerial implications as to how businesses can benefit from the results of the study need to be highlighted. Since the criteria for sample selection are not clear, the implications are assumed to be equal for all industries and for all companies which is probably not the case. This is why clarifying the criteria that were used for the sample selection are essential to factor in the effect of the context in the study.

7- A section dedicated to the study's limitations and future avenues of research shall be added.

Hope these comments help the authors further improve their draft. Best of luck.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Much better than the previous version although the results section as well as the literature review could be more concise. The authors should discuss the accepted and the rejected hypotheses as a group rather than doing it one by one (1a, 1b, etc.). This formatting is less appealing for readers since there are many hypotheses tested. The same formatting should be adopted in the literature review section where the authors keep using the same terminology (according to...). They should rather highlight how the different contributions in the literature complement each other (in addition...), oppose each other (in contrast), or cover the same scope (similarly). This should make the literature section more concise and relevant. Moreover, since the targeted journal scope is sustainability, a few sentences need to be added where relevant (including in the abstract) to show that the paper contributes (even in a broader way) to the journal's mission. Finally, in lines 74 to 84, the authors give an empirical rather than theoretical base to their research question. Mentioning hypotheses and testing in an introduction is not sound. The research gap needs to be drawn from existing literature. For example in lines 61 to 63, it is mentioned that "there are few empirical studies in the literature that relate the perception of employer branding strategies and the affective organizational commitment of employees. It is in this context that the present research aims to evaluate the impact that employer branding strategies have on the affective commitment of employees". If there are a few studies that have addressed the research gap, then the present study is not relevant. The authors need to prove that the research gap exists by highlighting what was done so far and what is still missing (that the authors will help address) and this cannot only be by mentioning that there are hypotheses that still need to be tested. The gap should be primarily theoretical and the objective could be to empirically test it. Last but not least, the authors cannot make vague statements such as in line 61 "there are a few studies". This claim is not supported by any references. 

Author Response

All reviewer’s comments have been considered. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf