Impact of Employee Well-Being on Employer Branding: A Systematic Review

Résumé

Employee well-being and employer branding are structurally convergent concepts, yet no prior systematic review has, to our knowledge, examined how well-being dimensions, taken explicitly and in their plurality, influence employer brand strength as perceived by employees. This systematic review aims to examine the extent to which the dimensions of employee well-being shape and reinforce employer brand strength in medium-sized and large enterprises. Following the six-stage protocol of Xiao and Watson (2019) and PRISMA 2020 guidelines, a narrative systematic review was conducted across Web of Science, Scopus, and CAIRN. The search identified 1,017 resources; after deduplication, approximately 840 unique records proceeded to screening, 41 were retained for full-text assessment, and a final corpus of 28 studies was constituted. Foundational conceptual works were included without a fixed start date; empirical studies are bounded by 2023. The synthesis is interpreted through Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964), Signaling Theory (Spence, 1973), Person-Organization Fit Theory (Kristof, 1996), and Self-Determination Theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000), a combination that remains underexplored in this field. Findings are organized across three thematic axes. All eleven studies on well-being foundations converge on its multidimensional nature, with autonomy, competence, and meaning identified as core dimensions across six of them. Six studies establish a positive association between well-being and engagement, commitment, and performance, though causal direction remains contested. Eleven studies on employer brand strength converge on the greater weight of symbolic over instrumental dimensions in shaping retention and identification; Benraïss-Noailles and Viot (2021, n=604) provide the only empirical test showing that positive well-being fully mediates the relationship between employer brand equity and intention to leave. From these findings, this review generates six theoretical contributions: well-being is identified as the necessary mediating condition between employer brand equity and retention; symbolic employer brand dimensions carry greater credibility than instrumental ones because they require genuine and sustained organizational investment; well-being dimensions constitute the values through which employees evaluate their person-organization fit; the four mobilized theories operate in sequence, as signaling communicates, fit filters, self-determination grounds the psychological mechanism, and exchange sustains; and three unresolved theoretical tensions regarding causal direction, the role of supervisor support, and the non-uniform effect of brand dimensions on loyalty are identified as priorities for future research; and well-being cannot be treated as a stable or universally transferable variable across organizational contexts. These contributions are formalized into five research propositions and a conceptual model connecting well-being dimensions to employer brand outcomes. For human resource management practitioners, they translate into five managerial levers: investing in relational quality, granting genuine autonomy, connecting work to broader purpose, making competence development visible, and ensuring stable structural workplace conditions.

Classification JEL: M12, M14, M31

Paper type: Systematic literature review