Trade unions and HRM

Here the author reviews the stated positions and responses of unions towards employer initiated human resource management developments. The information reviewed is drawn from Canada, Britain and the USA, with some differences being apparent between countries.     

An investigation of the short‐ and long‐run relations between executive cash bonus payments and firm financial performance: a pitch

This letter is a discussion of the application of the pitch template developed by Faff (2015) to a financial accounting research topic. The pitch template focuses ideas into key areas, giving clear and concise direction in planning and structuring the research idea. In this instance, the template is used in a nonlinear manner to develop a research proposal to investigate the relation between cash bonus payments and firm financial performance.     

Service level agreements: An essential aspect of outsourcing

This paper notes and explains the increasing use of service level agreements (SLAs), stresses their importance to insourcing and outsourcing relationships, proposes a taxonomy of service attributes, and recommends a hierarchical methodology for constructing SLAs. Evidence from interviews and examination of SLA documents suggests that well-designed SLAs contribute to fruitful relationships between business partners. The proposed methodology and taxonomy will simplify the time-consuming tasks of writing and negotiating SLAs. SLAs have not received academic attention proportionate to their commercial importance. Research to ascertain whether SLAs are used effectively and to seek better expression of business requirements in an SLA is appropriate.     

Individual employee choice between unions: some public sector evidence from Britain

Here the authors use sample data to identify some of the major influences on why nurses choose to be a member of one union, as opposed to other unions, in the NHS     

Opposition to unions in the non-union sector in Britain

Using data collected from over 1,000 individuals in 30 Finnish personnel funds, we study the links between pay knowledge, pay satisfaction and pay effectiveness. We find consistent evidence that higher levels of pay knowledge are associated with improved pay satisfaction and perceived pay effectiveness at the organizational level. We find that pay knowledge has an independent impact on organizational outcomes, rather than being mediated through pay satisfaction. Finally, comparing measures of actual pay knowledge and perceived pay knowledge, we find that the measures of actual knowledge were better connected to the outcomes. This last result suggests that to reliably estimate the relationship between pay knowledge and pay effectiveness researchers should prefer measures of actual knowledge.     

Internal Wage Structures and Organizational Performance

This paper considers whether a hierarchical or compressed wage structure is positively associated with relatively high levels of organizational performance. To date, there has been little empirical research in this area (especially in the UK). Thus we present an operational measure of a compressed/hierarchical wage structure, using UK manufacturing micro–data in five industrial sectors, and examine its relationship with labour productivity. We find that the wage compression argument holds in one sector but not for the majority of sectors and that taking into account other, intra–industry characteristics, namely size and ownership differences, further weakens the relationship.