Beyond the Badge: Do Sustainable Business Certifications Reflect Employees' Workplace Experiences? Evidence From Employee‐Reported Workplace Evaluations

ABSTRACT 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), a purposively selected dataset of 172 certified firms and a comparison group of 20,026 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) is analyzed. Both certifications are voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) and have scoring dimensions with a focus on workers. Using ANOVA, regressions, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the associations between certifications and employee evaluation are compared to test whether these two signal types match. The study finds that certified firms are evaluated better by their employees compared to non‐certified firms. However, no association between the scores achieved in certifications and employee evaluations is found. 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. The results contribute to organizational behavior and corporate social responsibility literature as a decoupling of external certification metrics from internal employee evaluations is identified. This 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.