Contributions published at Human Resource Management

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Trends like the globalization and the increasingly fierce competition on the markets press firms, more than ever before, to consistently study and improve their processes in order to survive on the competitive market. Also in the area of human resources, firms are bound to evaluate their costs and benefits and become more efficient. In this context, this study investigates the so called phenomenon of early job turnover, which describes turnover just after a new employee has entered an organization. First, the author provides an overview of the most important reasons for early job turnover. Thereafter the direct and indirect costs arising in the process for the most important parties involved in early job turnovers are evaluated. It results that turnover costs are especially high for highly complex and strategic positions and that a big part of these costs happen to be indirect, which is the reason why turnover costs are often underestimated by firms. The investigation of the costs of early job turnover makes it clear that firms can benefit in reducing them. Based on this outcome, recommendations to decrease early job turnover are provided in the last part of this thesis.

The aim of this thesis is to give further insight into the relation of cultural team diversity and leader prototypicality, while analyzing the possible effects on behavioral intentions (e.g., future attendance) through a moderated mediation. This will be done within the theoretical framework of the leadership categorization theory, the social identity model of leadership effectiveness, and the GLOBE study. The hypotheses for this thesis were tested on the basis of a survey of 512 incoming students, which were divided into 35 teams with 35 senior students as leaders. Cultural team diversity was measured by the student’s mother tongue and Blau’s (1977) index of diversity. As expected, results of the study indicate that cultural team diversity leads to a negative effect on leader prototypicality, an effect that is more pronounced in high cohesive teams. Additionally, results of the moderated mediation suggest that the indirect effect of team cultural diversity on behavioral intentions depends on the level of group cohesion. In more cohesive groups, team cultural diversity has a negative indirect effect, but in less cohesive groups, team cultural diversity has a positive indirect effect on behavioral intentions. The findings emphasize leaders to act in a group-oriented way, when team cohesion is high, but also see new chances for leaders in low cohesive groups. Further implications for theory and practice are given in the discussion.

Prototypicality can be benchmarked according to the leader (i.e., attributes that characterize “leaders”) or the group (i.e., attributes that characterize the follower group), and is a key determinant of leadership effectiveness. Given that these benchmarking processes are often biased in favor of men, paired with the persistent lack of women leaders, we examine if gender-related group prototypes can trump gender-related leader prototypes, restoring gender equality in responses to leadership. In a randomized field experiment with 35 teams, we manipulated leaders’ group prototypicality via group gender demography with male majority (20% women) and gender-balanced (50% women) teams. Leaders received two days of training. Then, we examined followers’ ratings of leader prototypicality after spending 6 hours together, as well as followers' subsequent behavior 3 months later as a proxy for leadership effectiveness. As expected, leader gender predicts leader prototypicality and indirectly predicts leadership effectiveness via leader prototypicality, effects are larger in male majority teams than in gender-balanced teams. Importantly, these effects occured despite no differences in leaders' self-reported prototypicality before or after the event, leading male majority or gender-balanced teams. Our findings support the social identity model of organizational leadership and indicate a boundary condition of role congruity theory. This evidence bolsters our need for a more social relational or context-based approach to leadership, promoting team construction as a method to “fix the game” for gender equality in responses to leadership without backlash towards women leaders.

Active sourcing, as a process step of the talent relationship management, is a helpful tool to recruit personnel successfully. This thesis presents and compares different active sourcing methods. Furthermore it shows the potential of active sourcing relating to current developments. Finally it gives suggestions how to implement active sourcing into the organi-sation. The thesis shows that the combination of different active sourcing methods leads to success. Because of different trends in our time, human resources are getting more important for organisations. At the same time the competition for the best employees is getting harder. The flexibly applicable Active Sourcing shows great promise for employee recruitment be-cause it considers the current developments. Different points have to be mentioned concern-ing the implementation of active souring into the organisation. First of all recruiter need to know their target group. In addition they are obliged to learn new IT skills and they have to become accustomed with new ways of communication. The use of active sourcing successful-ly allows the long-term management of the manpower requirement in the organisation. Keywords: Active Sourcing, Talent Relationship Management

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Considerable evidence indicates that individuals with obesity are vulnerable to stigma and discrimination. However, comparably less research has examined strategies to reduce weight bias, and the existing evidence is mixed. To help clarify these findings and incorporate prejudice-reduction interventions that have been successfully applied to other stigmatized groups (i.e., empathy-induction and perspective-taking), we experimentally tested and compared four different, brief stigma-reduction interventions in a national sample of American adults. Participants (N = 650) were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 experimental conditions (Empathy, Perspective-Taking, Causal Information, or Empathy/Information Hybrid) or a control condition. Outcome variables included explicit weight bias (Fat Phobia), social distance, and affective reactions to individuals with obesity. The empathy and perspective-taking conditions induced more empathy than the control and informational conditions, and altered affective reactions towards persons with obesity in the expected directions. However, no experimental condition reduced Fat Phobia or social distance relative to the control condition. The current findings suggest that empathy-evoking and perspective-taking strategies may increase empathy and alter affective reactions towards individuals with obesity; however, these strategies remain questionable as effective means to reduce weight stigma.

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Because of the increasing use of social media for nearly 10 years, it has won for the recruitment in importance. Static online job portals that allow only one-way communication, are no longer sufficient for companies to achieve the coveted target groups. In order to achieve more qualified candidates, but especially passive job candidates, employers use increasingly social media re-cruiting. XING, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the platforms that are most frequently used. This bachelor thesis examines the pros and cons of social media recruiting. The ad-vantages over static online job portals include the opportunity for bilateral communication, a faster dissemination of job postings and the opportunity to strengthen the employer brand. The disadvantage is that it is time consuming because recruiters need to understand the platforms to use them in a correct way and they need to react quickly to requests and comments. By inter-acting with the candidates they can no longer control what is said about the firm in these social media platforms.

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