Comparing motivating work characteristics,job satisfaction,and turnover intention of knowledge workers and blue-collar workers,and testing a structural model of the variables' relationships in China and Japan

This research examines motivating work characteristics, job satisfaction, and turnover intention of knowledge workers and blue-collar workers in China and Japan. The differences in these three variables were, respectively, compared between knowledge workers and blue-collar workers in China and Japan. A structural model of the relationships among the three variables was particularly proposed and investigated. Based on data from an international survey, the characteristics of knowledge workers were first compared with those of blue-collar workers in the same country, and then compared with those of knowledge workers in the other country. Finally, the structural model of the three variables' relationships was examined using a multi-sample analysis of the LISREL method across the countries. There were many significant differences found between knowledge workers and blue-collar workers and between China and Japan. As fundamentally predicted, knowledge workers were found to have higher motivating work characteristics than blue-collar workers in each country. More importantly, a similar structural model of the relationships among the variables was found across the countries.     

DIFFERENCES IN BELIEFS ABOUT WORK BETWEEN MANAGERS AND BLUE-COLLAR WORKERS

The beliefs about work of managers and blue-collar workers in the U.S.A. and Scotland were determined through a questionnaire. Both managers and blue-collar workers strongly endorsed humanistic beliefs and were indifferent to the work ethic. Blue-collar workers endorsed more strongly than managers beliefs about worker exploitation and the value of participation. In Scotland, there was a wide difference in the perceived value of leisure between managers and workers. It appears that the Scottish respondents hold fewer independent beliefs than their U. S. counterparts.     

On the job and co-worker commitment of Dutch agency workers and permanent employees

This article explores the relationship between employment status (agency workers vs. permanent employees) and affective and normative job and co-worker commitment. Our study was conducted on employees from four metal companies in the Netherlands. As HRM practices seem to influence employee commitment, we performed 89 interviews across all four companies and included blue-collar workers, their managers (direct supervisors, HR managers and production managers), as well as works council members. To test our hypotheses on commitment differences, we conducted quantitative research within the companies (permanent employees N = 167; agency workers N = 54), all blue-collar workers. Results show that permanent employees and agency workers express similar degrees of commitment to their job and to their co-workers, apart from affective commitment to co-workers, which is lower for agency workers than for permanent workers. We argue that national legislation, as well as managers' attempts to offer HR practices equal to those of permanent staff, play a prominent role in stimulating agency workers' commitment.     

Dismissals and match-specific rents

Labor contracts that result in dismissals are quite common in the real world. The question that arises is why employers do not just offer reduced wages instead of asking workers with low realized productivity to leave. This paper argues that such behavior can be explained by workers' understandable unwillingness to agree to contracts that an employer will not have an incentive to honor in the future. Specifically, we construct a matching model in which the employer and the worker are both uncertain about the value the other places on the match. Because the worker's match-specific productivity is the employer's private information, a commitment to pay a wage equal to the worker's value of marginal product is not enforceable. In the absence of a wage guarantee, the employer will offer retained workers wages below their value of marginal product, which causes quits to be inefficiently high. The employer can reduce quits by contractually promising a guaranteed wage to retained workers. Although this will lead to some involuntary dismissals, the loss from dismissals will be less than the gain from lower quits if the wage guarantee is not too high.     

Ambiguous effects of tax progressivity — theory and Danish evidence

Recent tax reforms in the OECD area have aimed at reducing the progressivity of labour income taxation by reducing marginal taxes for given average taxes. Theory has shown that this reduces employment/production when workers and firms determine wages through bargaining. This paper shows that an opposite effect arises when both wages and working hours are subject to bargaining. This may reverse the traditional result and this is especially likely if the bargaining power of workers is low and if labour supply is relatively elastic. In conclusion, the overall effect of a reduction in progressivity is ambiguous. The empirical estimates for Denmark indicate that the overall effect is negative for blue-collar workers and neutral for white-collar workers.     

A unique assessment center application with some unexpected by-products

A small, highly automated chemical plant needed blue collar workers for seven-man teams in an ‘enriched’ work environment: no foreman, 100% job rotation, and a rotating lead-man position. A mini-assessment center helped to identify the candidates to meet such unusual blue-collar requirements.     

Noncompete agreements,training, and wage competition

We study the effects of noncompete agreements in an environment where firms invest in training junior workers. After obtaining employer-provided training, trained workers can choose whether to remain loyal to their initial employer or switch to the competing employer. We evaluate the effects of noncompete agreements on wages, employment, investment in training, production, profits, and total welfare. Firms earn higher profits and pay lower average wage when they require workers to sign noncompete agreements.     

Ideological Currency in the Psychological Contracts of Corporate Manufacturing Employees

Previous research on employee psychological contracts has focused on three different types of expectations that workers have of their employers: transactional exchange of economic currency, relational exchange of socioemotional currency, and, more recently, covenantal exchange of ideological currency. This last type of currency, however, has been studied almost entirely in nonprofit workplaces among employees in helping professions (e.g., healthcare, education) who hold advanced degrees. Although not explicit in the extant literature, the implication of such is that expressions of ideological currency may be limited to certain types of professions. In the present study, we therefore analyzed both white and blue-collar employees’ ideological expectations in a corporate, for-profit, manufacturing environment. Using 1492 responses to an open-ended question received from an email survey, we found that 36% contained an expression of ideological currency, with an additional 44.8% possessing a possible expression of ideological currency. Comparisons of these expressions reveal many similarities between white and blue-collar employees within this organization as well as between these employees and those found in the published literature from workers in other industries. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and future research.     

Training and commitment in a German manufacturing company during the post-2008 crisis: a case of internal flexicurity

Studies on the links between training and organizational commitment have only looked at professional and managerial workers, mostly in the U.S. This paper focuses on a German manufacturing company that employed many blue-collar workers and offered generous training opportunities during short-time work in the post-2008 crisis. In an analysis based on employee survey data, only training in job-specific skills and training in skills usable outside of work were found to be associated positively with organizational commitment. The findings suggest that employer-provided training programs may be part of a model that achieves internal flexicurity in economies such as Germany.     

Competence development on the shop floor and industrial upgrading: case studies of auto makers in China

Industrial upgrading in China is rapidly increasing the competence requirements for employees on the shop floor. The institutional environment in China, however, does not seem very supportive: the quality of vocational education is often low and Chinese labor law provides strong incentives for companies to use temporary labor. This paper examines the competence development practices for blue-collar workers in automobile companies in China. Against expectations, automobile companies in China do not pursue ‘low road’ strategies but have designed intensive internal training programs and long-term career paths for blue-collar workers. Different theoretical explanations for the competence development approaches are discussed: human capital theory, high-commitment work systems theory, production systems theories, industrial relations and institutionalist theories. The paper is based on qualitative case studies of German, Japanese and domestic automobile manufacturers in China.     

Job insecurity and job satisfaction in the United States: the case of public sector union workers

We measure the association between perceived job insecurity and job satisfaction in the United States and focus on public sector union workers. Job satisfaction decreases with perceived job insecurity among union workers in the public sector and primarily when tenure with an employer is high.     

Employee Involvement And Pay At Us And Canadian Auto Suppliers

We use survey data and field research to investigate the effects of employee involvement practices on outcomes for blue-collar workers in the auto-supply industry. We find these practices raise wages by 3–5%. The causal mechanism linking involvement and wages appears to be most consistent with efficiency-wage theories, and least consistent with compensating differences. We find no evidence that employee involvement affects plants' survival or employment growth.     

Exits from unemployment: Recall or new job

This paper studies transitions out of unemployment in Spain distinguishing between recall to the same employer and reemployment in a new job. We use a large sample of newly unemployed workers obtained from Social Security records for Spain. These data contain information about each individual's employer identity before and after the unemployment spell. A discrete-time duration model with competing risks of exits serves us to investigate the factors that influence the probabilities of leaving unemployment to return to the same employer or to find a new job with a different employer. We find that taking into account the route to exit unemployment helps us to understand the influence of individual and job characteristics on the hazard rate. Moreover, the recall hazard rate exhibits no duration dependence, whereas the new-job hazard rate presents positive duration dependence.     

Work‐life balance and the software worker

This article examines the impact of employer flexibility to work‐life issues and negative spillover from work to non‐work life on the attitudes of software developers. Software workers present an interesting case for work‐life balance issues – Ackroyd et al (2000) designate them the key occupation to examine in future studies of ‘knowledge workers’, and Barrett (2001) states that they are the ‘vanguard’ of new working practices, with the separation of work and life being substantially more ‘blurred’ than for more traditional occupations. Despite this general perception of the work‐life boundary, our results show that intrusion of work into private life for this group of workers still has a substantial impact on work‐related attitudes. Work‐life boundary variables affect trust in the organisation which plays a mediational role in these variables' relationship to job satisfaction and organisational commitment. Our results suggest that even within this industry, where employees are relatively individualistic in orientation, highly marketable and unlikely to show attachment to a single organisation, mutual gains for employee and employer can be attained by an accommodating approach to non‐work commitments which may lead to greater organisational attachment.     

Gamifying employer branding: An integrating framework and research propositions for a new HRM approach in the digitized economy

The digital age calls for digital HRM approaches, as the “digitized” workforce confronts companies with changing requirements regarding their human resource practices. Most importantly, companies need to build strong employer brands to attract, motivate, and retain employees. One promising approach to employer branding in the digital age is to gamify companies' employer branding activities by means of serious games (i.e., digital games with an educational purpose). Both serious games and employer branding share the key characteristic of facilitating learning to create knowledge. Despite existing research on employer branding and serious games in separate streams, virtually no research addresses their relationship, albeit its strong relevance for researchers and practitioners alike. The authors discuss both domains and their relation, propose a conceptual framework building on a novel learning-based extension of the affective events theory, and derive directions for future research to advance the understanding of gamifying employer branding in the digitized economy.     

The effect of job satisfaction on job search: Not just whether,but also where

Using survey data of public sector employees in the Netherlands, this paper shows that workers' satisfaction with various job domains not only affects whether but also where workers search for another job. An intuitive pattern emerges. Workers try to leave their current employer when they are uncomfortable with an organisation-specific job domain, like management. Conversely, when workers are dissatisfied with a job domain that differs sufficiently across jobs within an organisation, like autonomy, they look for another position in their current organisation. Dissatisfaction with job domains which may have an industry-specific component, such as job duties, drives workers out of their industry. The findings provide a unique view on the relative heterogeneity of job domains across jobs within organisations and industries.     

An empirical assessment of assortative matching in the labor market

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workers may be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. We investigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer–employee data from Portugal. Using panel data methods, we quantify a firm-specific productivity term for each firm, and we relate this to the skill distribution of workers in the firm. We find that there is positive assortative matching, in particular among long-lived firms. Using skill-specific estimates of an index of search frictions, we find that the results can only to a small extent be explained by heterogeneity of search frictions across worker skill groups.     

Layoff victim's employment relationship with a new employer in Korea: effects of unmet tenure expectations on trust and psychological contract

Existing studies of psychological contract have largely focused on the effects of contract breach on employees' attitudes and the contract itself involving the same employer. Given that both workforce mobility and downsizing activities are increasing, it is important to understand how individuals' past employment experiences shape their relationships with their employers. The present study focuses on the effect of prior layoffs on relationships with new employers. We posit that furloughed workers experience layoff as a breach of the psychological contract of job security they have entered into with their employer. Longitudinal data collected from individuals who were re-employed following a layoff revealed that unmet tenure expectations in an employment relationship result in reduced trust in a new employer, which in turn negatively impacts the quality of psychological contracts with the new employer. The results also show that the relationship between unmet tenure expectations and trust was moderated by individual attributions regarding the cause of the layoff. The present findings suggest that the negative impact of contract breach experienced with one organization may carry over to subsequent organizational contexts.     

FDI activity and worker compensation: evidence from US non-manufacturing industries

This study examines worker compensation effects of FDI activity in US non-manufacturing industry sectors. A clustered standard error correction is used when estimating wage and non-wage compensation equations, with special attention given to FDI’s effect by worker educational attainment and union status. Wage findings reveal an FDI-wage premium for highly educated non-union workers and FDI-union rent erosion for all educational-gender groups excluding females with low educational attainment. Non-wage compensation analysis reveals FDI activity is generally associated with significantly higher probabilities of workers receiving employer financed non-wage compensation for union and non-union workers regardless of their level of educational attainment.     

Product Market Competition and Returns to Talent

This paper investigates how product market competition influences the wages paid to workers and the distribution of talent across industries. We develop a model where firms facing different competitive conditions bid for workers. The model predicts that wages are increasing in talent, decreasing in competition, and the interaction between talent and competition is positive. In addition, the most talented workers will be concentrated in competitive industries and talent dispersion rises with competition. We use linked employee–employer data to test these predictions.