Augmenting Employees’ Efforts in Innovation

Abstract

Strong labour laws play a major role in motivating innovation among employees. It has been found in the literature that stringency of labour laws is positively linked with employees’ efforts in innovation, in particular, wrongful discharge laws (WDL). However, employees may also bring nuisance suits against employers. Usually, the result of these suits is that both parties settle with each other. Thus, even if employees are justly dismissed, they may be able to bring nuisance suits against employers and gain a settlement amount. This article investigates how the possibility of nuisance suits affects the impact of WDL on employees’ efforts in innovation. In this respect, a game-theoretic model is developed in the article to find the equilibrium level of employees’ efforts in the presence of nuisance suits, where there is a possibility of employees getting discharged from the firm. I find that if nuisance suits are a possibility, the stringency of WDL has no impact on employees’ efforts if defence cost of the firm is low; but for higher defence costs, WDL affects employees’ efforts. The efforts exerted by an employee are found to be weakly increasing in the defence costs of the firm.