Tailoring Web-Based Recruiting Messages: Individual Differences in the Persuasiveness of Affective and Cognitive Messages

We also asked participants to respond to adapted measures of job organization attraction (i.e., Highhouse et al. 2003), job pursuit intentions, (i.e., Smither et al. 1996), and acceptance intentions (i.e., Harris and Fink 1987). Due to the highly correlated nature of these variables with perceived fit (i.e., ≥0.80) and similar effects were found during hypothesis testing for these criterion variables, we omitted these findings from the manuscript. Complete results can be obtained from the first author.

We examined two affect-related measures to test our hypotheses. Specifically, we used a measure of need for affect (NFA) (i.e., “the general motivation of people to approach or avoid situations and activities that are emotion inducing for themselves and others,” Maio and Esses 2001, p. 585) and a direct assessment of participants’ proclivities to rely on affect when reporting their attitudes about organizations. To calculate one’s proclivity for affect, we used a methodology similar to See et al. (2008), where participants responded to the following item anchored along a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “Not a Great Extent” to “To a Great Extent,” for seven organizational attitude objects: “To what extent do you think your attitudes toward (insert organization) are driven by your feelings/emotions?” We calculated a mean affect score for each participant by averaging their responses to the affect items across the seven organizations. We then used the aforementioned Judd et al. (2001) procedure to test the moderating hypotheses for P-O fit. Our results for the effects of message type on fit perceptions at high and low levels of both the affect-related measures approached, but were not statistically significant (i.e., NFA; t(197) = 1.82, p = 0.07, and direct assessment of affect; t(197) = 1.93, p = 0.06).