High‐performance work systems and workplace performance in small,medium‐sized and large firms

This article draws on the Organisational Growth and Development (OGD) life cycle model to explore the relationship between high‐performance work systems (HPWS) and performance in firms of different size, thereby extending understanding of congruence or ‘best fit’ theory within strategic HRM debates. With reference to management control theory, economies of scale and the availability of specialist managerial skills, the article hypothesises that while an HPWS–performance relationship might exist in small, medium‐sized and large firms, the relationship will be stronger in large firms than in both small and medium‐sized firms, and stronger in medium‐sized firms than in small firms. Analysis of data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey demonstrates, however, that there is no association between HPWS and workplace performance in medium‐sized firms, in contrast to the positive relationship between HPWS and performance found in large firms and between HPWS and labour productivity in small firms.     

European Works Councils and the dark side of managing worker voice

Drawing from case study research, the article explores managerial strategies in a UK‐based European Works Council (EWC), but from the perspective of workers' representatives. This methodological approach offers an alternative set of lens through which to view managerial strategy from the standpoint of those it is meant to affect. The evidence suggests that employers' representatives in central management appear to be proactively fragmenting worker voice, arguably in order to convert the EWC into a business‐friendly instrument and to assert managerial control. However, there is no empirical basis for arguing that such tactics yield organisational benefits. The employers' perceived strategies reflect the traditional cultural antagonisms that are historically played out between workers and managers in the particular sector in which the firm is embedded. The article has practical implications for HR managers who are viewed, rightly or wrongly, with suspicion and distrust by employee representatives.     

How and when matter: Exploring the interaction effects of high‐performance work systems,employee participation,and human capital on organizational innovation

Existing research on the relationship between high‐performance work systems (HPWS) and organizational innovation has paid insufficient attention to the boundary effects of employee participation and human capital. Bridging the human resource management (HRM) and employment relations literature, this study contributes to the contingency view of HRM and China‐specific research by investigating how human capital and employee participation, direct voice mechanism, and corporate governance participation jointly moderate the relationship between HPWS and organizational innovation. We test our three‐way interaction model using a sample of 108 firms and 1,250 employees in China. The results suggest that HPWS are positively associated with organizational innovation when employees with relatively less human capital are coupled with more direct voice mechanism or less corporate governance participation. In contrast, HPWS are negatively related to organizational innovation when employees possessing greater human capital are coupled with more direct voice mechanism. The theoretical and managerial implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Employee voice and regulation in the residential aged care sector

This article examines the interaction of regulation and employee voice in the residential aged care sector. In particular, it considers the regulatory forces shaping the expression of voice in the human services sector through the examination of three aged care providers. It suggests that in a sector characterised by low levels of unionisation and a preponderance of non‐union workplaces, employee voice does not act as a significant regulator of managerial decision‐making, rather a combination of external and internal constraints that regulates the expression of voice. This study identifies the regulatory role of location, labour law and social norms. It also highlights that the importance of these constraints will vary in different organisational contexts and as a consequence of interaction with internal regulation. Such internal regulation is most commonly expressed through the exercise of managerial prerogative.     

Assessing the long‐run economic impact of labour law systems: a theoretical reappraisal and analysis of new time series data

Standard economic theory sees labour law as an exogenous interference with market relations and predicts mostly negative impacts on employment and productivity. We argue for a more nuanced theoretical position: labour law is, at least in part, endogenous, with both the production and the application of labour law norms influenced by national and sectoral contexts, and by complementarities between the institutions of the labour market and those of corporate governance and financial markets. Legal origin may also operate as a force shaping the content of the law and its economic impact. Time‐series analysis using a new data set on legal change from the 1970s to the mid‐2000s shows evidence of positive correlations between regulation and growth in employment and productivity, at least for France and Germany. No relationship, either positive or negative, is found for the UK and, although the United States shows a weak negative relationship between regulation and employment growth, this is offset by productivity gains.     

A comparison of the effectiveness of employee voice arrangements in Australia

The incidence and effectiveness of different forms of employee voice were compared across three measures: perceived managerial responsiveness to employee needs, job control and influence over job rewards. Multiple regression analyses revealed that voice was perceived as most effective when an amalgam of different forms was present. The effective coexistence of different forms of voice challenges the notion that non‐union voice acts as a substitute for union representation.     

Trust in management: the role of employee voice arrangements and perceived managerial opposition to unions

This study examines the relationship between employee voice arrangements and employees' trust in management using data from the 2007 Australian Worker Representation and Participation Survey of 1,022 employees. Drawing on social exchange theory and employee relations literature, we test hypotheses concerning the relationships between direct and union voice arrangements, perceived managerial opposition to unions and employees' trust in management. Consistent with our predictions, after controlling for a range of personal, job and workplace characteristics, regression analyses indicated that direct voice arrangements were positively related to employees' trust in management. Union voice arrangements and perceived managerial opposition to unions were negatively related to trust in management. The article concludes by highlighting the study's implications for management practice and avenues for further research.     

The World Technology Frontier: What Can We Learn from the US States?*

We re‐estimate the world technology frontier non‐parametrically using a dataset covering OECD country‐level data and US state‐level data on GDP per worker and the stocks of physical capital, unskilled labour and skilled labour. The auxiliary use of US state‐level data significantly reduces the upward bias in cross‐country estimates of technical efficiency, and so does allowing for imperfect substitutability between skilled and unskilled labour. We then use our adjusted estimate of the world technology frontier in a series of decompositions of productivity differences and sources of economic growth in the OECD in 1970–2000, including also ‘appropriate technology vs. efficiency’ decompositions.     

Workforce churning,human capital disruption,and organisational performance in different technological contexts

We assess the influence of workforce churning on the relationship between organisational human capital and labour productivity. Building on collective turnover research and human capital theory, we examine how the components of workforce churning (i.e., voluntary turnover, involuntary turnover, and new hires) influence the relationship between existing human capital and labour productivity. Further, we examine how this influence varies according to a firm's technological intensity. Our data come from 1,911 Italian manufacturing firms and reveals that collective voluntary turnover negatively affects the relationship between organisational human capital and labour productivity regardless of an organisation's level of technological intensity. In contrast, collective involuntary turnover enhances the relationship between human capital and labour productivity, and its effect is even stronger for organisations with more technologically intensive operations. Finally, our results suggest that the integration of new hires disrupts the relationship between human capital and productivity, particularly for firms with technologically intensive operations.     

The reform of Joint Labour Committees—the re‐commodification of labour?

The reform of Joint Labour Committees in Ireland is analysed as a victory for neoliberalism within the shell of pluralist traditions in industrial relations: a floor of rights is transformed into an ‘iron ceiling’; worker voice is drastically reduced; reform is consistent with the re‐commodification of labour within the EU.     

Mind the channel! An affordance perspective on how digital voice channels encourage or discourage employee voice

We apply an affordance lens on qualitative data from three case organisations using a digital voice channel providing employees with the opportunity to speak up via answering periodic mini‐surveys and making comments in an anonymous mini‐forum. We find that imbrications of material and social agencies (i.e., the voice channel's features and managerial reactions to voice) in the respective organisational contexts culminate in employees perceiving the channel as either affording or constraining voice, leading to perceived voice outcomes that eventually encourage or discourage them to speak up. Whether voice is encouraged or discouraged partly results from the mere interaction between employees and the digital voice channel independent of managerial reactions. Our findings thus challenge the emphasis on managerial behaviour and reactions to voice in explaining voice behaviour and outcomes in extant literature.     

The responsiveness of wages to labour market conditions in the UK

If wages are more flexible in the sense that pay is more responsive to labour market conditions, this has important implications for the workings of the aggregate economy. First, the real fluctuations generated by both demand and supply shocks are smaller, and second, the economy can operate at a higher level of activity relative to potential without adverse inflationary consequences (i.e., the NAIRU is lower). Our empirical analysis of wage flexibility suggests that UK wages have become more responsive to labour market conditions since the mid-1980s, at least relative to the previous decade. Furthermore, this has happened within certain industrial sectors. Finally, a part of this move towards greater responsiveness has been due to the decline in national pay bargaining over the relevant period. However, the majority of this change is due to some other factors.     

Theorising determinants of employee voice: an integrative model across disciplines and levels of analysis

This article critiques organisational behaviour (OB) research on employee voice and presents a broader‐based conceptual model that integrates ideas and concepts across employment relationship disciplines and levels of analysis. OB studies err by taking an overly individualistic, psychological, managerialist and de‐institutionalised perspective on employee voice. This criticism is documented and illustrated with numerous examples from the OB literature. To provide a constructive step forward, the article presents an enlarged model of employee voice that not only includes OB but also brings in important contributions from the HRM, industrial relations, labour economics and labour process fields. The model provides an integrative framework for theoretical and empirical studies of voice and yields a number of research and practice implications.     

Performance Pay and Offshoring

In this paper, we construct a North–South general equilibrium model of offshoring, highlighting the nexus among endogenous effort‐based labor productivity and the structure of wages. Offshoring is modeled as international transfer of management practices and production techniques that allow Northern firms to design and implement performance compensation contracts. Performance–pay contracts address moral hazard issues stemming from production uncertainty and unobserved worker effort. We find that worker effort augments productivity and compensation of those workers assigned to more offshorable tasks. An increase in worker effort in the South, caused by a decline in offshoring costs, an increase in worker skill, or a decline in production uncertainty in the South, increases the range of offshored tasks and makes workers in the North and South better off. An increase in Southern labor force increases the range of offshored tasks, benefits workers in the North, and hurts workers in the South. International labor migration from low‐wage South to high‐wage North shrinks the range of offshored tasks, makes Northern workers worse off and Southern workers (emigrants and those left behind) better off. Higher worker effort in the North, caused by higher worker skills or lower degree of production uncertainty, decreases the range of offshored tasks and benefits workers in the North and South.     

Labour productivity and employment in Australian manufacturing SMEs

This paper examines the relationship between labour productivity and employment in Australian manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The results indicate that labour productivity of SMEs varies substantially between industries within the manufacturing sector, but on average labour productivity for manufacturing SMEs increased at a faster rate than that of large manufacturing enterprises across all industries. All manufacturing industries except one recorded employment growth during the period under study. However like labour productivity growth, employment growth also varies across industries within the manufacturing sector. Yet the study could not establish any definite relationship between labour productivity growth and employment. This finding is consistent with some previous studies.     

Do cultural differences explain differences in attitudes towards unions? Culture and attitudes towards unions among call centre workers in Britain and India

This article adds to the literature on worker attitudes towards unions by investigating the impact of cultural attitudes and the call centre labour process on union attitudes among call centre workers in Britain and India. It is hypothesised that workers with egalitarian and collectivist cultural attitudes will be more likely to have pro‐union attitudes than other workers, although if the impact of cultural attitudes is mediated by history and institutions, it might be expected that this relationship is stronger for British than Indian workers. Conversely, if union attitudes are largely a function of the call centre labour process, we would expect union attitudes to be similar among workers in both countries. Our results only partially support our hypotheses. Collectivist attitudes are only weakly related to union attitudes among the British sample but are more strongly related in the Indian sample. There are significant differences between union attitudes among our British and Indian samples. The article concludes that relationship between cultural attitudes and union attitudes are heavily dependent on institutional context. Cultural attitudes are unlikely to be either a constraint or a facilitator of union efforts to organise workers.     

Does immigration increase labour market flexibility?

The question we investigate empirically in this article is whether immigration makes the labour supply in the receiving country more responsive to regional differences in economic opportunities. The main merit of the paper is that we examine three stages in the regional mobility of refugees and labour immigrants: First, the settlement pattern of newly arrived immigrants, second, their subsequent mobility between regions and, third, their eventual exit from the regional labour market to abroad. The analyses apply to immigrants who arrived in Norway from 1995 to 2004. In all three stages, mobility is investigated with regard to its responsiveness to regional differences in wages and unemployment. The main finding is that, in all three stages, the geographical mobility of immigrants is sensitive to regional economic opportunities. In that sense, immigrants do “grease the wheels” of the labour markets, through all the three stages of mobility. The most robust results are found for regional unemployment differences. With regard to natives, we generally do not find any strong evidence for “greasing the wheels” effects.     

Training and organisational innovations in a local industrial system: empirical evidence from Emilia‐Romagna1

The article studies the driving forces of firm training using a survey‐based dataset of manufacturing firms in the Emilia‐Romagna region, Northern Italy. The data are derived from the responses to a structured questionnaire administered in 2002 to the management of a representative sample of firms with more than 50 employees in the highly industrialised province of Reggio Emilia. Firms’ training choices are analysed using a theoretical/conceptual framework based on the notion of complementarity among productive factors. Training is provided as long as it favours the establishment of complementary relationships among the skills it develops and other inputs. The main factors associated with training include structural characteristics, HRM practices, workforce features, labour management and performance of the firm. Training activities emerge as being positively associated with organisational practices that affect the whole firm: workforce skill level, firm size, firm productivity and labour flexibility. The role of HRM practices in driving training is brought into question. These are key issues for the current debate on the development of local systems in the European and Italian context. The high and joint relevance of structural variables and labour demand‐related factors shows that regional industrial policies must support labour policies within an integrated policy effort aimed at increasing potential firm productivity.     

POLITICIZED MANAGERIAL CAPITALISM: ENTERPRISE STRUCTURES IN POST-SOCIALIST CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

The paper contributes to the sociological tradition of comparative institutional analysis. It argues that a distinctive form of capitalism is emerging in post 1989 Central and Eastern Europe, politicized managerial capitalism. This is a bifurcated system, one sub‐system internationally oriented, a still peripheral but increasingly integrated part of global capitalism, and a second sub‐system, more nationally oriented, dominated by managerial élites allied with weak states. Politicized managerial capitalism is founded upon the inherited practices of late Socialism, moulded by the post Socialist development process and congruent with the stage of development of capital, labour and product markets. It is unclear as to whether this is a transient or long‐term structure.     

On Work and Authority: Issues in Job Enlargement, Job Enrichment, Worker Participation and Shared Authority

Abstract . Continued debate over the nature of work is adding to an existing vast literature in labor economics, business and personnel administration, industrial sociology and social psychology. Both theory and experience indicate that the authoritarian workplace results in social costs through reduced labor productivity and increased worker dissatisfaction. But progress toward shared authority and worker participation in the administration of the production process promises to be slow. Management generally preserves a legitimized authority, defending it with the misplaced rationale of elitism, i.e., the presumed functional superiority of managers. Unions will not press for shared authority, for to do so would undermine their basic and formal function of organizational restraint of managerial authority. Thus, while management and union logically protect their traditional roles, the worker and society are denied the potential benefits of basic changes in work and authority.