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In this article, we broaden the focus of existing research on employee stock purchase plans by analysing employee preferences for investing in employer stock as a construct distinct from actual investment behaviour. In our analysis of original survey data in a sample of 900 employees in four French companies, we find that employee preferences are influenced by two common cognitive heuristics (representativeness and familiarity), organisational commitment, the perceived quality of corporate communications about these plans and perceived managerial commitment to employee ownership. We did not find, however, that risk aversion, turnover intentions or perceived employee involvement in decision making influenced preferences for investing in employer stock. Our findings have both theoretical and practical implications for understanding and operating these types of employee benefit plans, which are becoming more common across the globe.

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit.Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Laval et l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. C omparative organizational research consists of the systematic detection, identification, measurement and interpretation of similarities and differences of organizational behavior among employees of different cultural groups (Adler, 1983;Boddewyn, 1965). During the past decades, there has been a growing body of literature addressing the specific methodological problems of this type of research, such as the equivalence of constructs, samples, and measurement instruments. Meaningful cross-group comparisons presuppose that the measurement instruments used to assess attitudes, values or behaviors, operate in an equivalent way across groups (i.e., that they measure the same thing in the same way). This is usually called measurement equivalence. If measures are not equivalent, interpretations of differences in mean levels or in the pattern of correlation of the measures are potentially artifactual and may yield misleading or even incorrect results (Mullen, 1995). In case of severe lack of measurement invariance, substantive comparisons cannot be performed, possibly even requiring the collection of new data (Vandenberg, 2002).Prior to a further description of the present article, a word on terminology is needed. The field of comparative studies uses a set of terms such as equivalence in multiple ways (e.g., Johnson, 1998). In order to avoid terminological confusion, we define two key terms here. "Measurement equivalence" refers here to scales and to the issues related to designing and examining whether instruments work the same way in different cultures, whereas "measurement invariance" is narrower and refers here to the statistical tests designed to verify the measurement equivalence of scales. Issues regarding measurement equivalence are getting more and more popular in organizational research after the publication of several state-of-the art articles on the topic (e.g., Cavusgil & Das, 1997;Hui & Triandis, 1985;A. W. Meade & Lautenschlager, 2004a;Peng, Peterson, & Shyi, 1991;Reise et al., 1993;Schaffer & Riordan, 2003;Singh, 1995;Steenkamp & Baumgartner, 1998;Vandenberg, 2002;Vandenberg & Lance, 2000). However, those articles focus principally on the statistical methods and procedures for assessing measurement invariance, rather than on how to develop multigroup equivalent measures. The approach described in the present article incorporates equivalence issues in the scale development process. Our aim is to describe a step-by-step procedure for developing measures that are more likely to provi...

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