Stefanie Wolter

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 ...

Management Practices, Workforce Selection, and Productivity

We study the relationship among productivity, management practices, and employee ability using German data combining management practices surveys with employees’ longitudinal earnings records. Including human capital reduces the association between productivity and management practices by 30%–50%. Only a small fraction is accounted for by the higher human capital of the average employee at better-managed firms. A larger share is attributable to the human capital of the highest-paid workers, that is, the managers. A similar share is mediated through the pay premiums offered by better-managed firms. We find that better-managed firms recruit and retain workers with higher average human capital.