Abstract
This chapter focuses on a set of human resource management (HRM) practices that are concerned with the ways in which employees are organised and incentivised at the point of production, taking its lead from the literature which argues that the use of high-involvement work organisation, incentives, and performance targets will aid productivity and workplace performance. The findings suggest that workplaces in France are more likely than those in Britain to adopt ‘high-performance’ work practices. The use of incentives is associated with higher productivity in both countries, delivering better financial performance in France and higher wages in Britain.
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Notes
- 1.
It can be noted that other parts of the literature focus on HRM’s fit with other attributes of the firm, besides its location, such as its business strategy (see, e.g., Schuler and Jackson 1987).
- 2.
We use the label ‘high-performance’ as a reference to the practices’ theorised effects, rather than as any pre-judgement of their association with workplace performance in our data.
- 3.
As previously noted, we have no broadly comparable measure of job rotation—a practice which is commonly considered alongside the use of team-working and problem-solving groups.
- 4.
Although the WERS questions are restricted to the largest occupational group, we would expect that, when autonomous production teams are indicated in REPONSE, they are used by at least some core workers at the establishment.
- 5.
In Britain, the use of autonomous work teams rose from 37% of private sector workplaces with 21 or more employees in 2004 to 48% in 2011. In France, it rose from 39% to 49%.
- 6.
These figures are not inconsistent with the European Working Conditions Survey 2010: the proportion of permanent workers using computers almost all of the time was 39% in France compared with 46% in the UK.
- 7.
It rose from 32% to 38% in Britain, and from 32% to 39% in France, among private sector workplaces with 21 or more employees.
- 8.
The first four types of schemes all offer specific tax advantages in Britain.
- 9.
This does not necessarily indicate non-compliance among large firms in France. Some private sector workplaces belong to non-profit organisations, for instance.
- 10.
In France, the appraisal meeting usually happens once a year, just before decisions are made around pay.
- 11.
We drop the indicator relating to targets over wage costs, as it is the least comparable. Detailed results from the principal components analysis are available from the authors on request.
- 12.
The exception is that, in France, share ownership sits more with the work organisation and ICT grouping than with the other incentive practices.
- 13.
Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions controlling for workplace and organisation size, workplace age, industry, location, whether listed, family and foreign ownership, market share, competitive strategy, training intensity, internal labour market (ILM) orientation, use of temporary contracts, presence of specialist HR manager, and membership of employers’ association. French advantage on work organisation score halves to 0.15; French advantage on incentives and targets scores remain largely unchanged.
- 14.
When the work organisation scale is regressed on the targets scale in a pooled sample of workplaces from Britain and France, the interaction between the targets scale and a country dummy for Britain is negative and statistically significant at the 1% level. When the work organisation scale is regressed on the incentives scale, an equivalent interaction term is negative and statistically significant at the 5% level.
- 15.
For example, in 2011 Germany scored 1.3, the USA 1.6, Japan 1.8, Italy 2.0, and Ireland 2.2.
- 16.
Those large food hypermarkets which do exist receive more visitors than the Chateau de Versailles.
- 17.
It suffices to note that the broad patterns discussed earlier in the chapter remain after controlling for other factors.
- 18.
Some accounting data are available for around two-thirds of REPONSE workplaces, but the data relate to the performance of the broader firm, rather than the specific workplace. A similar situation applies in the case of WERS but, there, such data are available for only around one-third of our sample. We thus opt to focus on the subjective rating, which is available for the vast majority of our sample and which refers specifically to the performance of the sampled workplace. See Chap. 3 for a brief discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the subjective measures.
- 19.
It may be recalled from the earlier discussion around Table 5.6 that we are able to explain a substantial amount of the variance in the use of incentive practices. This helps to limit the possibility that the positive association between incentives and financial performance may simply be the product of unobserved heterogeneity (omitted variables).
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Askenazy, P., Forth, J. (2016). Work Organisation and Human Resource Management: Does Context Matter?. In: Amossé, T., Bryson, A., Forth, J., Petit, H. (eds) Comparative Workplace Employment Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57419-0_5
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