A question of degree? Why some of the best companies to work for in Spain are better than others

Many national and international rankings select a subset of companies within a country or a set of worldwide international companies as the best to work for. Despite this homogenization, the scores they are assigned by these indexes and from which their positions in the rankings are established, are not equal. In this investigation, we try to establish whether the differences among the punctuations of the best companies to work for in Spain could be explained by certain contextual factors. An econometric model has been estimated in order to ascertain whether the nationality/economic-cultural area of origin, the autonomous community where the headquarters are based (for both factors, either through mechanisms of standardization or through local adjustment), the company size (either through structural flexibility or resources availability), stock exchange listing (through constraints forced on companies by both the property structure and the time-horizons derived from being listed), and the industry can all explain those differences. Results show that companies scores (1) tend to increase as a function of size and of stock exchange listing, (2) vary across autonomous communities, and (3) do not differ neither across nation/economic-cultural areas of incorporation nor across different sector of activity.