Beyond The Badge: Exploring The Connection Between Sustainable Business Certifications And Employee Satisfaction

This study examines the relationship between sustainability certifications and employee satisfaction by conceptualizing certifications as external signals and internal organizational resources. Drawing on signaling theory and the resource-based view (RBV), we analyze a dataset of 173 certified firms and a control group of 20,022 firms, combining certification data from B Corp and Economy for the Common Good (EconGood) with reviews from kununu, the leading employer review platform (ERP) in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Both certifications are Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) and have scoring dimensions with a focus on workers. Using ANOVA, regressions, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), we compare the association between certifications and employee evaluation to test whether these two signal types indeed match. We find that certified companies are evaluated better by their employees compared to non-certified companies. However, we do not find an association between the scores achieved in certifications and employee evaluations. CFA reveals a significant but moderate correlation between the constructs measured by the ERP and the worker dimensions of the certifications, indicating partial conceptual overlap. Our results contribute to organizational behavior and corporate social responsibility literature as we identify a decoupling of external certification metrics from internal employee evaluations. We point to the need for companies to ensure that their commitments to sustainability match the experience perceived by employees and provide ethically relevant insights into ways in which organizations can enhance the credibility of their sustainability claims. In this way, our study advances theory, as it combines the RBV and the signaling view to explain why external signals for sustainability may not be in line with employee evaluations, thus enriching the conceptual understanding of authenticity in CSR.