The effects of the change from a collective performance evaluation to an individual one, or vice versa, on work teams and their effectiveness are studied in a real work setting in which two work ...teams recently experienced a change in evaluation procedures, from a collective one to an individual one for the first work team and from an individual one to a collective one for the other. When evaluation criteria made the identification of individual contributions impossible without individual evaluation, collective evaluation was associated with increased suspicion between team members and reduced performance, when compared with individual evaluation. This study helps to identify these two elements: 1. When one or the other evaluation procedure is associated with positive outcomes. 2. Which evaluation criteria should be selected in order to enhance the positive effects of collective evaluation on performance generated by cooperation and collective regulation.
Le communautarisme dans les relations de travail. Voilà un beau sujet, qui comporte bien des énigmes. L'une des plus essentielles peut-être est de savoir en quoi cette question du communautarisme, à ...supposer qu'elle se laisse saisir, interpelle, comme on dit, le droit du travail. Et, le cas échéant, si elle le regarde. Reproduced by permission of Bibliothèque de Sciences Po
Two studies are reported that investigate the relationships among commitment and motivation mindsets and their contribution to work outcomes. Study 1 involved 487 nurses from a hospital in the center ...of Italy. Results showed that commitment's facets were related to parallel dimensions of work motivation. Study 2 involved 593 nurses from a hospital in the north of Italy. Analyses indicated that commitment and motivation were important antecedents of working attitudes and behaviors. Moreover, self-determined motivation played a critical mediating role in positive behaviors. Findings are discussed in terms of their practical implications for organizations and employees.
Two contrasting views tend to dominate the literature on the impact of recessions on employment. One view is that recessions amount to a ‘critical conjuncture’ for work and employment systems, a time ...when firms try to transform radically existing employment models. The alternative perspective is that firms, constrained mostly by the forces of path dependency, seek to adjust to the immediate or short‐term pressures of the recession but otherwise maintain the established way of organizing the employment relationship. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this literature by reporting the findings of a major study of the effects of the recession on work and employment in firms based in Ireland. The main finding to emerge from the study is that firms mostly have made improvised adaptations in response to the crisis and have shied away from far‐reaching transformational strategies.
•We estimate product and labor market imperfections in France, Japan and the Netherlands.•We consider two product and three labor market settings, thus distinguishing 6 regimes.•We classify 30 ...comparable manufacturing industries in these regimes.•We find important regime differences across the three countries.•We also observe differences in the levels of product market imperfections within regimes.
Allowing for three labor market settings (perfect competition or right-to-manage bargaining, efficient bargaining and monopsony), this paper relies on two extensions of Hall’s econometric framework for estimating simultaneously price–cost margins and scale economies. Using an unbalanced panel of 17653 firms over the period 1986–2001 in France, 8728 firms over the period 1994–2006 in Japan and 7828 firms over the period 1993–2008 in the Netherlands, we first apply two procedures to classify 30 comparable manufacturing industries in 6 distinct regimes that differ in terms of the type of competition prevailing in product and labor markets. For each of the predominant regimes in each country, we then investigate industry differences in the estimated product and labor market imperfections and scale economies. Consistent with differences in institutions and in the industrial relations system in the three countries, we find important regime differences across the three countries and also observe differences in the levels of product market imperfections and scale economies within regimes.
With this article, the authors are the first to analyze and explain the relationship between part-time employment and firm productivity. Using a unique data set on the Dutch pharmacy sector that ...includes the working hours of all employees and a "hard" physical measure of firm productivity, the authors estimate a production function including heterogeneous employment shares based on working hours. The authors find that firms with a large part-time employment share are more productive than firms with a large share of full-time workers: a 10% increase in the part-time share is associated with 4.8% higher productivity. Additional data on the timing of labor demand show that this can be explained by a different allocation of parttimers compared with full-timers. This enables firms with large parttime employment shares to allocate their labor force more efficiently across working days.
Exploiting information from a panel of European firms we study the joint effect of EPL and financial market imperfections on investment, capital-labour substitution, labour productivity and job ...reallocation. We find that EPL reduces investment per worker, capital per worker and value added per worker in high reallocation sectors relative to low reallocation sectors, while increasing the average frequency at which firms adjust their capital stock. The reduction in capital per worker and value added per worker is less pronounced in financially sound firms. Also, the propensity to invest appears to increase only in firms that are likely to be financially unconstrained. Overall, poor access to credit markets seems to exacerbate the negative effects of EPL on capital deepening and productivity.
Employability is believed to be a crucial concept concerning employees’ job
security. This study investigates whether factors associated with human capital and
the dual labour market predict ...perceived employability. Two national representative
Swedish samples are used, representing economic recession (1993, N ¼
4952) and prosperity (1999, N ¼ 6696). Employability was perceived as
higher during prosperity, but human capital factors as well as dual labour market
factors predicted perceived employability, irrespective of the time period. These
findings indicate that the understanding of employability is enhanced by considering
both structural and individual dimensions.
In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers (those with fewer ...than 5 years of experience) for any reason and without the hearing process typical in many urban districts. Results suggest that the policy reduced annual teacher absences by roughly 10% and reduced the incidence of frequent absences by 25%. The majority of the effect was due to changes in the composition of teachers in the district, although there is evidence of modest incentive effects for young untenured teachers.
Labour law protects employees in a number of ways. So, for example, the Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995 (the 'LRA') protects employees against unfair dismissal and unfair labour practices and grants ...extensive collective bargaining rights to trade unions and their members (see Ch II and VIII of the LRA). Furthermore, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997 (the 'BCEA') shields employees against exploitation by establishing 'basic conditions of employment' (s 1 of the BCEA). Workers may, for instance, not work longer than 45 hours per week and they are entitled to at least 21 consecutive days' annual leave (see ss 9 and 20 of the BCEA; Van Niekerk, Christianson, McGregor, Smit and Van Eck Law@work (2015) 102-104). These established basic conditions of employment take precedence over conditions of service which may have been agreed on in terms of the common-law contract of employment (see s 5 of the BCEA; Grogan Workplace law (2014) 63-64). This protection provided by labour law is acceptable in the legal tradition on the understanding that it is essential to establish a more equal balance between the comparatively weaker bargaining positions of employees relative to their employers (Davies and Freedland Kahn-Freund's Labour and the law (1983) 14; Benjamin 'Labour law beyond employment' in Le Roux and Rycroft (eds) Reinventing labour law: Reflecting on the first 15 years of the Labour Relations Act and future challenges (2012) 22). In the modern era, employees' rights are also recognised as fundamental human rights. Amongst the rights to human dignity and equality, the South African Constitution also expressly protects everyone's right to 'fair labour practices' (s 23(1); Van Eck 'Constitutionalisation of South African labour law: An experiment in the making' in Fenwick and Novitz (eds) Legal protection of worker's human rights: Regulatory changes and challenges (2010) 259).
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