Screening, Competition, and Job Design

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These “high-performance work systems” are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition are important driving forces behind these new forms of work organization. We document in particular the endogenous emergence of two fundamentally distinct types of employment strategies. Employers either implement a control strategy, which consists of low effort discretion and little or no rent-sharing, or they implement a trust strategy, which stipulates high effort discretion and substantial rent-sharing. If employers cannot screen employees, the control strategy prevails, while the possibility of screening renders the trust strategy profitable. The introduction of competition substantially fosters the trust strategy, reduces market segmentation, and leads to large welfare gains for both employers and employees

Screening, Competition, and Job Design

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These “high-performance work systems†are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition are important driving forces behind these new forms of work organization. We document in particular the endogenous emergence of two fundamentally distinct types of employment strategies. Employers either implement a control strategy, which consists of low effort discretion and little or no rent-sharing, or they implement a trust strategy, which stipulates high effort discretion and substantial rent-sharing. If employers cannot screen employees, the control strategy prevails, while the possibility of screening renders the trust strategy profitable. The introduction of competition substantially fosters the trust strategy, reduces market segmentation, and leads to large welfare gains for both employers and employees.job design; high-performance work systems; screening; reputation; competition; trust; control; social preferences; complementarities

Screening, Competition, and Job Design: Economic Origins of Good Jobs

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition are important driving forces behind these new forms of work organization. We document in particular the endogenous emergence of two fundamentally distinct types of employment strategies. Employers either implement a control strategy, which consists of low effort discretion and little or no rent-sharing, or they implement a trust strategy, which stipulates high effort discretion and substantial rent-sharing. If employers cannot screen employees, the control strategy prevails, while the possibility of screening renders the trust strategy profitable. The introduction of competition substantially fosters the trust strategy, reduces market segmentation, and leads to large welfare gains for both employers and employees.job design, high-performance work systems, screening, reputation, competition, trust, control, social preferences, complementarities

Screening, Competition, and Job Design: Economic Origins of Good Jobs

In recent decades, many firms offered more discretion to their employees, often increasing the productivity of effort but also leaving more opportunities for shirking. These "high-performance work systems" are difficult to understand in terms of standard moral hazard models. We show experimentally that complementarities between high effort discretion, rent-sharing, screening opportunities, and competition are important driving forces behind these new forms of work organization. We document in particular the endogenous emergence of two fundamentally distinct types of employment strategies. Employers either implement a control strategy, which consists of low effort discretion and little or no rent-sharing, or they implement a trust strategy, which stipulates high effort discretion and substantial rent-sharing. If employers cannot screen employees, the control strategy prevails, while the possibility of screening renders the trust strategy profitable. The introduction of competition substantially fosters the trust strategy, reduces market segmentation, and leads to large welfare gains for both employers and employees.Job design, high-performance work systems, screening, reputation, competition, trust, control, social preferences, complementarities, SOEP

Pay Inequality, Pay Secrecy, and Effort: Theory and Evidence

We study worker and firm behavior in an efficiency-wage environment where co-workers' wages may potentially influence a worker's effort. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers' responsiveness to co-workers' wages should lead profit-maximizing firms to compress wages under quite general conditions. Our laboratory experiments, on the other hand, show that --while workers' effort choices are highly sensitive to their own wages-- effort is not affected by co-workers' wages. As a consequence, even though firms in our experiment tended to compress wages when wages became public information, this did not raise their profits. Our experimental evidence therefore provides little support for the notion that inter-worker equity concerns can make wage compression, or wage secrecy, a profit-maximizing policy.

Sustainable Supply Chain Management with NGOs, NPOs, and Charity Organizations: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

With the gradually increased awareness of sustainability development, external organizations, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profit organizations (NPOs), and charity organizations, play an increasingly crucial role in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). The participation of external organizations not only helps the firms to improve reputation, but also regulates and improves their SSCM. Based on this motivation, we identify the major research domains and examine each domain's evolution by using the objective review methods, including Citation Network Analysis and Main Path Analysis in this literature review paper. Five research domains are recognized, namely, “sustainable supply chain framework design”, “supply chain coordination/collaboration”, “closed-loop supply chain”, “regulation”, and “subsidy and donation”. We review the most influential papers in each research domain to show the evolution of these studies. Based on our review findings, we successfully propose four future research agendas with eight specific issues and innovatively establish a new research framework. The outputs of this review paper can guide the researchers on future search topics and contribute to the development of SSCM with the consideration of organizations.</p

Attracting Applicants with Corporate Social Responsibility: A Social Dilemma Perspective

There has been a surging interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in society, and business leaders perceive that CSR is essential in business operations. However, CSR can lead to unsatisfactory outcomes when not appropriately understood or practiced. Therefore, I conducted two studies to provide an alternative CSR perspective (Study 1) and empirically test how firms can benefit the most from CSR in applicant attraction (Study 2). In Study 1, I analyzed CSR as an organizational social dilemma (Rockmann & Northcraft, 2018), where the conflicts among stakeholders and between short- and long-term outcomes are inevitable. To minimize these conflicts, firms need to aim at long-term value maximization (Jensen, 2002) to provide the maximum outcome to the firm and satisfy all relevant stakeholders. Adopting these perspectives, I introduced Enlightened Shared Value (ESV) and compared ESV with major CSR approaches. ESV provides a clear metric and the method for CSR, which is lacking in existing CSR approaches. I suggest that shifting focus to long-term outcomes can reduce the conflicts in CSR and make CSR a win-win game. In Study 2 ( N = 425), I investigated how CSR affects applicant attraction in job choice situations. Previous research has shown that CSR positively affects applicant attraction in job choice situations, but less is known about the relative importance of each CSR dimension in applicant attraction. Categorizing CSR into four dimensions (employee, environmental, social, and governance) and applying adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis (ACBC: Orme, 2020), I examined how each CSR dimension and important tangible attributes differently affect applicant attraction in job choice situations and how personal values influence the relationship. Additionally, I conducted an exploratory cluster analysis to segment individuals based on the pattern of their preference among job attributes in job choice situations. Results from ACBC showed that the employee dimension had the largest influence on applicant attraction among the CSR dimensions, followed by the environmental dimension. However, CSR dimensions’ influence on applicant attraction was mostly weaker than that of tangible attributes, especially salary. As a personal value measure, social value orientation (Murphy et al., 2011) positively influenced CSR’s influence on applicant attraction. Also, the exploratory cluster analysis revealed three different groups: CSR-oriented (23.3%), Individualistic (26.4%), and Pragmatic (50.4%). Taken together, findings from both studies contribute to theory and practice. First, understanding CSR as a social dilemma not just provides a new CSR perspective. It also helps practitioners by suggesting that ESV can lead to corporate value maximization in the long term. Second, CSR dimensions and their differing influences on applicant attraction, which I found in Study 2, suggest that CSR needs to be understood as multi-faceted. Still, more discussion is needed for CSR categorization. Third, findings from the conjoint and cluster analyses suggest that when firms use CSR to attract applicants, they need to understand that CSR influences applicants differently. Therefore, it is important to set target applicant groups and emphasize relevant CSR dimensions to attract them

The Permeability of Network Boundaries: Strategic Alliances in the Japanese Electronics Industry in the 1990s

This paper looks at the choice of strategic partners for alliance formation in the Japanese electronics industry during the post-bubble economic period 1992-97. Results from a dyad analysis of 128 companies suggest that firms tend to look for partners within their existing vertical keiretsu networks of organizations for alliances that target the creation of resources that build on existing knowledge (production or distribution) but that this common keiretsu effect disappears for alliances that involve new knowledge creation (new product or technology development). The role of corporate networks, environmental uncertainty and their implications for our understanding of strategic alliance formation and the dynamics of social networks are discussed.

The embeddedness of global production networks: The impact of crisis on Fiji's garment export sector

In this paper the author explores how changing geopolitical conditions reconfigure network embeddedness and theorises the conditions of network disconnection and transformation. Through a case study of the changes in interfirm relationships within the Fiji – Australia garment-production network after Fiji’s 2000 political coup d’état, the author develops a relational and dynamic view of embeddedness, highlighting its multifaceted and multiscalar character and emphasising the interrelationships between embeddedness, trust, and power