Patrick Kampkötter

Do Employees Reciprocate to Intra-Firm Trainings? An Analysis of Absenteeism and Turnover Rates

This article contributes to the debate on the link between reciprocal motives of employees and HRM practices by studying the behavioral effects of intra-firm trainings on absence behavior and turnover probability. We apply the gift-exchange framework and offer a behavioral perspective that helps to explain why firms invest in trainings that provide mainly general skills. We argue that employees may reciprocate the gift of firm-sponsored training with higher levels of costly effort or commitment. We employ a stringent methodological approach based on panel data of a large multinational firm and find that, in contrast to human capital predictions, general trainings lead to a decrease in turnover rates. Most notably, we find the strongest effect for employees with the lowest levels of firm tenure. This is a quite novel result as this group should face the lowest separation costs, for instance, due to the accumulation of firm-specific human capital. Hence, intra-firm trainings are an important retention device, especially for newly or recently hired employees. Furthermore, a short-term decrease in absenteeism indicates a temporary, reciprocal reaction by employees.

More Dispersion, Higher Bonuses? On Differentiation in Subjective Performance Evaluations

We investigate the claim that supervisors do not differentiate enough between high- and low-performing employees when evaluating performance. In a first step, this claim is illustrated in a formal model showing that rating compression reduces performance and subsequent bonus payments. The effect depends on the precision of performance information and may be reversed when cooperation is important. We then investigate panel data spanning different banks and find that stronger differentiation indeed increases subsequent bonus payments. The effect tends to be larger for larger spans of control and at higher hierarchical levels but is reversed at the lowest levels.

Performance Appraisals and Job Satisfaction

Formal performance appraisals (PA) are one of the most important human resource management practices in companies. In this paper, we focus on the reaction of employees to these performance assessments. In particular, we investigate the effect between the incidence of being formally evaluated by a supervisor and job and income satisfaction. Building on a representative, longitudinal sample of more than 12,000 individuals from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we apply fixed effects regressions and find a significantly positive effect of PA on job satisfaction, which is driven by appraisals that are linked to monetary outcomes. Furthermore, the moderating effects of personality traits (Big Five, locus of control) on the relationship between PA and job satisfaction are explored. We find a negative interaction term between PA without any monetary consequences and both employees scoring high on openness to experience and internal locus of control. This suggests that for these employees appraisals, which induce performance monitoring without any monetary consequences, have a detrimental effect on job satisfaction rates.

Measuring the use of human resources practices and employee attitudes

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new data source available for researchers with interest in human resources management (HRM) and personnel economics, the Linked Personnel Panel (LPP). Design/methodology/approach – The LPP is a longitudinal and representative employer-employee data set covering establishments in Germany and a subset of their workforce and is designed for quantitative empirical human resource research. Findings – The LPP employee survey applies a number of established scales to measure job characteristics and job perceptions, personal characteristics, employee attitudes towards the organization and employee behaviour. This paper gives an overview of both the employer and employee survey and outlines the definitions, origins, and statistical properties of the scales used in the individual questionnaire. Practical implications – The paper describes how researchers can access the data. Originality/value – First, the data set combines employer and employee surveys that can ...

Non-executive compensation in German and Swiss banks before and after the financial crisis

We provide an extensive overview of the determinants of compensation schemes for non-executive employees in the German and Swiss financial services industry. We analyze how pay systems adjust in the aftermath of the financial crisis and find that the crisis had a deep impact on short-term bonus payments. Our results indicate that restrictions on bonus payments may lead to higher fixed salaries and, hence, to a lower performance sensitivity of compensation. We also show that fixed compensation packages are highly standardized between banks, whereas bonus payments are more strongly related to differences between individuals. In Germany, bonuses vary to a higher extent across companies, whereas in Swiss banks, the differences are almost negligible when adding firm controls.

Pay-performance sensitivity of compensation contracts for nonexecutive employees: the case of the financial crisis

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the appropriateness of bonus payments for employees in the banking and financial services sector has been discussed controversially. While past research has predominantly focused on the pay-performance sensitivity for CEOs or top executive employees, little is known about this relationship for employees below the top executive level. We contribute to the literature by investigating a large sample of German and Swiss banks and find that nonexecutive bonus payments significantly followed firm performance prior to the financial crisis, but this effect vanished in the crisis period. Furthermore, in both periods, the estimated performance sensitivity is higher when negative returns are capped at zero.