Managing careers in downsizing firms

The literature on managing careers has traditionally been based on the twin assumptions of organizational growth and increased opportunities for individual advancement. Large-scale layoffs in the 1980s and continued downsizing in the 1990s, however, have left organizations questioning how to develop the careers of their employees under conditions of diminished resources and have left employees wondering how to manage their own careers under conditions of diminished opportunities. This article examines the issues involved in managing careers in downsizing firms from both the organization's and the individual's perspective. In addition, it explores not only short-term tactics for handling career disruptions which occur at the time of downsizing but also longer-term strategies for managing careers during times of little or no organizational growth. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Job mobility and the gender wage gap in Italy

This paper investigates the contribution of gender differences in job mobility to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that over the first 10 years of labour market experience job mobility accounts for up to 30% of total log wage growth for men and only 8.3% for women, and that this difference is mainly due to differences in returns to mobility. The gender mobility gap is robust to the inclusion of individual, job and firm characteristics, to different ways of accounting for individual unobserved heterogeneity, and is mainly found for voluntary job moves. Looking at the characteristics of the jobs and the firms' workers move to, we find that moves to larger firms represent by far the main source of gender differences in returns to mobility. We offer two possible explanations for this finding; one which involves differences in bargaining behaviour and one which relates to the theory of compensating differentials.     

Job transfers and job-bid systems in restructuring Japanese and American firms

When Japanese firms restructured their operations in the 1990s, Japanese employees were not fired and were often transferred together in groups inside firms or to related outside firms. Undergoing similar business restructuring from the late 1980s on, American firms fired low-performing white-collar employees, and excess midoodle-performing white-collar employees were fired if they could not locate other jobs in the firms by using 'job-bid' systems (systems that identifyopenings and allow individuals at their own choosing to 'bid' for those openings). American unionized blue-collar workers were laid off based on seniority rules. Although similar job-bid systems were introduced into Japanese firms in the 1990s, they were used only for certain white-collar jobs. In the United States, job-bid systems commonly were used for both blue- and white-collar employees. Overall, the Japanese employment system was characterized by management control and stable employment in contrast to the active role played by individual choice in an environment of unstable employment in the United States.     

Job and wage mobility with minimum wages and imperfect compliance

We propose a job search model with minimum wage regulations and imperfect compliance to explain the doubling of the mean and variance of hourly earnings of white males during the first 18 years of labor market experience. The model encompasses job mobility and on‐the‐job wage growth as sources of wage dynamics, and is estimated by simulated generalized method of moments using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youths 1979. Our estimates provide a good fit for the observed levels and trends of the main job and wage mobility data, and for the increase in the mean and variance of wages over the life cycle, as well as for the fall in the fraction of workers paid below the minimum wage. Job mobility explains 40–50% of the observed wage growth. Increases in the minimum wage and/or compliance deliver small effects on the wage distribution and the nonemployment rate. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Job mobility restriction mechanisms and appropriability in organizations: The mediating role of secrecy and lead time

This paper addresses the following question: does mobility restriction enhance the appropriability of R&D investments? And if so, how does this occur? We propose that mobility restriction mechanisms affect appropriability through their impact on secrecy and lead time. We test mediation hypotheses in a sample of biotechnology firms and discuss the implications for intellectual property protection strategies and human resource management.     

International graduate students' perceptions and interest in international careers

This research developed and tested a comprehensive model of the antecedents of international graduate students' interest in an international career. Based largely on Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), the model included elements that pertain to perceptions of external constraints (perceptions of the labor market, family pressure to return), international student experience (adjustment in the foreign country during graduate studies, exposure and immersion to the international context) and individual factors (self-efficacy with respect to working abroad and outcome expectancy). Participants were 139 international graduate students in the UK. Individual factors and perceived constraints were directly related to interest in an international career. The factors that comprised current international student experience were indirectly related to interest via their relationship with self-efficacy, while adjustment moderated the relationship between self-efficacy and interest. Although the hypothesized moderating role of family pressure to return did not materialize, the findings suggest that perceptions of constraints play a more substantial role in the formation of interest than has been assumed by SCCT theory thus far. The findings are discussed with respect to their implications for the literature and for the policies of host country stakeholders.     

Highways and productivity in manufacturing firms

Using a geo-coded micro-level panel dataset for Spanish manufacturing firms, I estimate the effect of access to highways on firm-level productivity. To identify the causal effect of highways, I have relied on different fixed-effects specifications, instrumental variables and controls for geography, geology and history. Since highways also attract economic activity, leading to local density increases, which in turn could affect productivity through agglomeration benefits, I also present estimations that control for local employment densities. The results show that highways raise firm-level productivity directly and beyond the effect of density. Additional results show that highway benefits are unevenly distributed across sectors and space.     

Evolving corporate governance and firms performance: evidence from Japanese firms

This study is an attempt to investigate the implications of the ownership structure and control transfers in the Japanese corporate market, which are attributed mainly to the government’s liberalization policies during 1990s. It appears that institutional shareholdings—either financial or non-financial corporations—are associated with poor performance, whereas the foreign and domestic private ownerships lead to an improvement in the performance of the firms. We observe that unwinding the cross-shareholding between banks and corporations and mutual transfers among non-financial institutions allows for efficiency gain. Furthermore, the ownership transfer to private and foreign individuals is consistently associated with high market value, which implies that individuals’ transfers lead to an increase in efficiency.     

工作投入与工作卷入和工作狂的区分

工作投入(work engagement)是组织心理学家在最近引入的一个新概念,新的概念在最初被介绍的时候,总是要避免与已经存在的概念相重复。工作倦怠(burnout)的研究已经有30多年的历史了,是当前人们争相研究的热点,它     

Employment and wage practices of Japanese firms in the Philippines: convergence with Filipino-Chinese and Western-owned firms

In foreign-owned Philippine firms, human resource approaches and practices tend to converge. Japanese-owned firms localize their human resource practices by emphasizing local standards and practices in compensation, hiring, recruitment, job assignments and the like. On the other hand, Western-owned firms tend to adopt well-known Japanese style practices. Filipino-Chinese-owned firms tend to be traditional, emphasizing both informal and hierarchical control mechanisms which put a premium upon loyalty and trust, through familistic, informal but hierarchical control mechanisms. As the owners of these firms pass on control to the next generation, they tend to hire professional managers. These managers include younger generation Filipino-Chinese educated abroad. They are torn between the rational, and traditional norms and practices insisted upon by their Confucian-oriented elders, and the demands of a competitive and ever-changing technology and economy.

It is quite meaningless to attach adjectives like ‘Japanese’, ‘Filipino-Chinese’ or ‘Western’ to universal concepts like industrial relations and human resource approaches - the search for the best approach in work relations is beyond the issue of convergence or divergence.     

A female ghetto? Women's careers in call centres

Although several studies have shown that women make up the majority of the call centre workforce, their role and position in this new and expanding industry has not yet been examined. This article makes a contribution to the research gap by exploring the extent and nature of the career opportunities open to women within call centres. Current portrayals of call centre work appear to indicate that these new workplaces offer very little in the way of either job satisfaction or potential for career progression. Indeed, on the basis of existing research evidence it could be concluded that call centres represent little more than female job ‘ghettos’. The article assesses this claim by drawing on women's own accounts of their work experiences and their perceptions of their prospects.     

工作要求和工作资源对工作投入的影响研究

本文在JD-R理论框架下,探讨工作要求、工作资源与工作投入之间的关系。通过对服装企业研发人员的问卷调查与统计分析,结果显示:服装企业研发人员的工作投入状况整体处于中等偏上水平;工作要求与工作投入呈弱负相关性,工作资源对工作投入具有较强的正相关性,并且工作资源的不同维度对工作投入有显著正向预测作用,显示了工作资源对提高工作投入的特殊作用。     

New firms and employment creation

This paper uses some simple microeconomic tools to explain the net effect on employment of different types of new firm formation. The first section of the paper examines the way in which actual employment in new firms has been calculated in recent empirical studies. The next section looks at the relationship between the actual and net employment effects of formations and argues that the former may not be a good guide to the latter. The final section examines the policy implications of the analysis.     

Global careers: a social capital paradox

Global careers, typically defined as involving multiple international relocations including various positions and assignments in several countries, have recently received increasing research attention. This interest is driven by a growing corporate need for managers who are able to deal with global integration and co-ordination in large multinational corporations. An important aspect of the competency of a global manager is his or her social capital, i.e. the network relationships he or she possesses. However, while the concept of social capital has been widely used in a number of research fields recently, it has received relatively little attention thus far in the IHRM context. This paper contributes to this research gap, and seeks to answer the empirical research question of how multiple international relocations affect the social capital of a manager. Our qualitative interviews of 20 Finnish MNC managers with global careers identified that such careers represent a ‘social capital paradox’. Global careers are characterized by a broad and diverse network of both internal and external ties. This breadth and diversity relate to (1) the managers' internal contact networks of weak ties (2) their internal support networks of strong ties and (3) their external networks of both strong and weak ties. These typical characteristics represent three major social capital paradoxes in the sense that they carry both significant social–capital-related benefits as well as potential risks.     

Job satisfaction and quits

We test the wealth maximization theory of quitting behavior on the German Socioeconomic Panel (1985–2003). With the interpretation of job satisfaction as an expression of the experienced preference for the present job against available alternatives, the propensity to stay in the present job is simply related to the residual of a job satisfaction equation. We show that this residual is a better predictor of quits than the overall level of satisfaction. Furthermore, we validate a dynamic extension of the economic theory of quits for which uncertainty in the expectation of future events plays a decisive role.     

Job quality in Europe

Promoting job quality and gender equality are objectives of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in spite of a downgrading of the attention given to both in the revised employment guidelines and the relaunch of the Lisbon Process. However, advances on both of these objectives may be important complements to the employment rate targets of the EES, as access to good quality jobs for both sexes is likely to help sustain higher employment rates. While the European Commission has a broad view of the concept of job quality in practice, it relies on a selection of labour market type indicators that say little about the quality of the actual jobs people do. Using data from the 2005 European Working Conditions survey, we analyse job quality along three dimensions: job content, autonomy and working conditions. We conclude that gender and occupational status, along with other job characteristics such as working time and sector, have more influence on an individual's job quality than the country or ‘national model’ they are situated in. Our results also demonstrate the value of developing indicators of job quality that are both gender sensitive and derived at the level of the job rather than the labour market in order to advance EU policy and academic debate on this topic.     

Capital gains: expatriate adjustment and the psychological contract in international careers

This paper argues that the notion of adjustment to careers involving international assignments needs to be developed further than the current literature reflects. An expatriate assignment is an expatriate's opportunity to build career capital and a company's opportunity to generate social and intellectual capital. The extent of the capital gains will depend considerably on the expatriate's adjustment during and after the assignment, which is influenced by the psychological contract. We argue that our understanding of the career impact of expatriation will be enhanced by a more refined picture of the adjustment that expatriates experience during the assignment and during repatriation. In particular, we examine adjustment as process rather than as event. We propose a broad conception of expatriate adjustment and its link to careers. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Job Loss and Entrepreneurship

We examine the impact of job loss on entrepreneurship behaviour. Our identification strategy relies on the use of mass layoffs caused by bankruptcies as indicators of exogenous displacement. Building on Norwegian register data, we find that working in a company which is going to close down due to bankruptcy in the near future raises the subsequent entrepreneur propensity by 155% for men and 180% for women, compared to working in a stable firm. These estimates are much larger than previously reported in the literature. Taking into account that many workers lose their jobs in the comparison group of stable firms also, we suggest that the full effects of displacement are even larger.