High-performance Workplace Practices Research Articles

Human resource management technology, workplace performance, and employee well‐being in the British public sector

AbstractUsing linked employer–employee data for workplaces in Britain, we find high‐performance workplace practices (HPWPs) are positively associated with public sector workplace performance. Contrastingly, HPWPs are not associated with measures of public sector employees' well‐being or motivation. The implication is that the performance effects of HPWP in the public sector constitute part of efficient management technology, without the need to invoke special employee responses as mediators. Public sector findings differ from those in the private sector: in the latter, HPWPs are positively associated with some performance outcomes but employee outcomes are a complex mix of non‐significant, positive, and negative associations.

High-performance work practices and organizational performance in Pakistan

PurposeResearch on the relationship between high-performance workplace practices (HPWPs) and organizational performance has largely focussed on western settings, limiting the knowledge of how these systems influence performance in other countries, including Pakistan. Universalistic assumptions underpin the HPWP paradigm; to examine the validity of these assumptions, the purpose of this paper is to study the links between HPWP and performance in Pakistan, a country with different cultural norms and institutional settings to those in which most research has been conducted.Design/methodology/approachThe authors draw on a unique survey of 392 establishment managers in the banking, pharmaceutical and information technology sectors. The authors include managers of foreign-owned multinational subsidiaries and domestic firms to ensure the sample represents firms in Pakistan.FindingsThe authors find that some individual HPWPs (recruitment and training) are associated in a statistically significant way with lower labour turnover, higher productivity and higher financial performance. Employee involvement is associated with lower labour turnover and higher labour productivity. Compensation is associated with higher financial performance. None is linked to higher labour turnover, lower productivity or lower financial performance in a statistically significant way. Performance appraisal was not statistically significantly associated with any of the three outcome variables.Originality/valueThe results provide some relatively strong support for universalistic assumptions, but also highlight the need for future research to examine the variable links of some HPWPs and the lack of any association for the performance appraisal measure.

Who benefits from firm-sponsored training?

Workers participating in firm-sponsored training receive higher wages as a result. But given that firms pay the majority of costs for training, shouldn't they also benefit? Empirical evidence shows that this is in fact the case. Firm-sponsored training leads to higher productivity levels and increased innovation, both of which benefit the firm. Training can also be complementary to, and enhance, other types of firm investment, particularly in physical capital, such as information and communication technology (ICT), and in organizational capital, such as the implementation of high-performance workplace practices.

High-Performance Workplace Practices in Nursing Homes: An Economic Perspective

To develop implications for research, practice and policy, selected economics and human resources management research literature was reviewed to compare and contrast nursing home culture change work practices with high-performance human resource management systems in other industries. The organization of nursing home work under culture change has much in common with high-performance work systems, which are characterized by increased autonomy for front-line workers, self-managed teams, flattened supervisory hierarchy, and the aspiration that workers use specific knowledge gained on the job to enhance quality and customization. However, successful high-performance work systems also entail intensive recruitment, screening, and on-going training of workers, and compensation that supports selective hiring and worker commitment; these features are not usual in the nursing home sector. Thus despite many parallels with high-performance work systems, culture change work systems are missing essential elements: those that require higher compensation. If purchasers, including public payers, were willing to pay for customized, resident-centered care, productivity gains could be shared with workers, and the nursing home sector could move from a low-road to a high-road employment system.

The Human Capital Dimensions of Sustainable Investment: What Investment Analysts Need to Know

This paper identifies a number of questions that need to be answered if the growing interest in building investment portfolios of firms that follow socially and environmentally sustainable practices is to be successful in transforming the financial institutions and analysts from a liability to an asset in expanding the number of sustainable firms in the economy. Evidence from three decades of research on “high performance workplace practices” is reviewed that identifies what is required for firms to align human capital and financial strategies. A longer term research and education agenda is presented for answering the remaining open questions.

Workplace Design, Complementarities among Work Practices, and the Formation of Key Competencies: Evidence from Italian Employees

The author analyzes the extent to which High Performance Workplace Practices (HPWP) act as a mediating variable between High Performance Work Organization (HPWO) and the economic outcomes of firms in developing workers' key competencies, which include higher order cognition, problem-solving, and self-reflexivity. Using a large survey of Italian employees drawn from a government-constructed database, the author finds that HPWPs that comprise greater worker discretion, participation in improvement groups, inclusion in workplace improvement schemes, and involvement in performance evaluation help employees develop such competencies, thus enabling firms to thrive and grow. He also shows that these organizational work practices result in more efficient production when simultaneously adopted as a bundle, which confirms the importance of complementarities or synergies among such practices.

Innovation, industrial relations and employee outcomes: evidence from Italy

PurposeThis paper seeks to examine the relationships between working conditions, innovation activities and industrial relations in two local production systems located in the northern Italy, exploiting data collected throughad‐hocsurveys in 2004 and 2006.Design/methodology/approachThe paper follows a recent stream of literature, which is still quite scanty, that addresses the issue of the implication for workers derived from the introduction of organizational changes. This topic is addressed and extended, taking into consideration both the role of firm level industrial relations and the role of other innovation activities that may influence working conditions.FindingsThe results seem to support the position maintained by the advocates of organizational changes. Job empowerment is spurred by the form of organizational changes usually defined as high performance workplace practices. However, such typology of changes in the organization does not seem to be linked with positive trends in safety/security and stress. At the same time the positive role of cooperative industrial relations on the working condition emerges, also as complementary elements to innovation activities.Originality/valueThis work confirms some relevant empirical results obtained in international literature about the linkages between organizational changes and working conditions. At the same time it provides an original perspective of analysis taking into account other influencing factors of workers' well being: good quality industrial relations at firm level and innovation activities such as technological innovation and ICT.

The Influence of Stock Market Listing on Human Resource Management: Evidence for France and Britain

We use data from the Relations Professionnelles et Negociations d'Entreprise survey of 2004 and the Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004 to analyse how far approaches to human resource management differ according to whether an establishment is part of a company with a stock exchange listing. In both countries we find that listing is positively associated with teamworking and performance-related pay, while in France, but not in Britain, it is also linked to worker autonomy and training. Our findings are inconsistent with the claim that shareholder pressure operates as a constraint on the adoption of high-performance workplace practices. The pattern is similar in the two countries, but with a slightly stronger tendency for listing to be associated with high-performance workplace practices in France.

High Performance Workplace Practices and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from Europe

Using individual data from the European Survey on Working Conditions (ESWC) covering all EU member states, this study aimed at contributing to our understanding of the effects of High Performance Workplace Organizations (HPWOs) on worker's job satisfaction. The estimation results show that a higher involvement of workers in HPWOs is associated with higher job satisfaction. This positive effect is dominated by the involvement of workers in flexible work systems, indicating that workers particularly value the opportunities associated with these systems, such as an increased autonomy over how to perform their tasks, and increased communication with co-workers. Being involved in team work and job rotations as well as supporting human resource practices appear to contribute relatively little to the increased job satisfaction from being involved in HPWOs.

How Workers Fare When Employers Innovate

Complementing existing work on firm organizational structure and productivity, this paper examines the impact of organizational change on workers. We find evidence that employers do appear to compensate at least some of their workers for engaging in high performance workplace practices. We also find a significant association between high performance workplace practices and increased wage inequality. Finally, we examine the relationship between organizational structure and employment changes and find that some practices, such as self-managed teams, are associated with greater employment reductions, while other practices, such as the percentage of workers involved in job rotation, are associated with lower employment reductions.

Reassessing the Impact of High Performance Workplaces

High performance workplace practices were extolled as an efficient means to increase firm productivity. The empirical evidence is disputed, however. To assess the productivity effects of a broad variety of measures, we simultaneously account for both unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity using establishment panel data for Germany. We show that increasing employee participation enhances firm productivity in Germany, whereas incentive systems do not foster productivity. Our results further indicate that firms with structural productivity problems tend to introduce organisational changes that increase employee participation whereas well performing firms are more likely to offer incentives.

Innovative Workplace Practices and Occupational Injuries and Illnesses in the United States

This article studies the consequences of organizational innovations on occupational injuries and illnesses in the American private sector over the past 20 years. High-performance workplace practices such as total quality management, job rotation and autonomous work teams can damage workplace health and safetythey can increase the intensity of work both in manufacturing and tertiary industries, and some practices can even be incompatible with the design and the assinirlation of safety rules. Using surveys on organizational changes in the USA, management literature and BLS-OSHA data, we show for 26 sectors that the adoption of high-performance practices seems correlated to a dramatic increase in occupational injuries and illnesses.

Intensity of management resistance: understanding the decline of unionization in the private sector

IX. Conclusions Although Lipset and Katchanovski present many of the major societal and structural causes that have influenced the decline of private sector unions, they have unfortunately omitted a factor that can account for as much as 40 percent of the decline in private sector union membership, i.e., intensity of management opposition. The managerial incentives to stop unionization are formidable because unions raise wages and reduce profits. Economic reasons for American managers to stop unionization have grown as the wage between union and nonunion workers has widened over the past 40 years especially relative to EU nations. In addition, as managerial accountability to shareholders has risen and pay related to performance has grown, top executives have attempted to raise productivity through high-performance workplace practices or lowering real wages. Since many of these practices rely on top-level executives being able to make decisions on personnel quickly without challenges from employees or due process, they have fought unions more vigorously in order to maintain this discretion over workplace decisions. Although this behavior by management may result in a more efficient allocation of resources from both a micro-and macroeconomic perspective, the losses to society occur in terms of greater income inequality and less employee voice at the workplace and in the political arena.

What's Driving the New Economy? The Benefits of Workplace Innovation

Using a unique nationally representative sample of U.S. establishments surveyed in both 1993 and 1996, we examine the relationship between workplace innovations and establishment productivity and wages. Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data, we find evidence that high-performance workplace practices are associated with both higher productivity and higher wages. Specifically, we find a positive and significant relationship between the proportion of non-managers using computers and the productivity of establishments. We find that firms re-engineer their workplaces and incorporate more high-performance practices experience higher productivity. For example, profit sharing is associated with increased productivity, and employee voice has a large positive effect on productivity when it is implemented in the context of unionized establishments. These workplace practices appear to explain a large part of the movement in multifactor productivity over the 1993-96 period. When we examine the determinants of wages within these establishments, we find that re-engineering a workplace to incorporate more high-performance practices leads to higher wages. However, increasing the usage of profit sharing results in lower regular pay for workers, especially technical workers and clerical/sales workers. Finally, increasing the percentage of workers meeting regularly in groups has a larger positive effect on wages in unionized establishments.

Specialization, Multiskilling and Human Capital: Complementarity vs. Substitutability

The introduction of team-based flexible production system substantially enhanced productivity and product quality at some progressive plants which adopted them. Most of these plants adopted a bundle of human resource practices which are designed to encourage workers to acquire broad skills and share information, and delegate more responsibilities to production workers. The existing literature, however, has not fully explained why workers are better motivated under these high-performance workplace practices despite their seemingly higher responsibilities and weaker hold-up power. It also does not answer why firms delegate considerable decision rights to workers given the possibility that such delegation may increase the bargaining power of the workers more than the firms want. In order to answer these questions, we focus on an incentive aspect of the multiskilling practices and compare it with that of specialization in the traditional work systems. We discover that organizational forms significantly affect the workers' incentives to acquire firm-specific human capital and the optimal allocation of decision rights. Key is that information-sharing by multiskilled workers induces the workers' investments in firm-specific human capital to become strategic substitutes. In the traditional work systems, on the contrary, they are more likely to be strategic complements. Assuming worker-employer relationship with ex post bargaining based on skill acquisition rather than output-contingent contracts, the following basic results are derived: (1) workers' incentives to invest in firm-specific human capital tend to be stronger; and (2) the optimal level of delegation is typically higher, in organizations with multiskilling practices than in those with specialization. Other implications of human capital complementarity and substitutability for collusion, labor union formation and job design are also discussed.