The Impact of Workplace Human Resource Management Practices on Company and Employee Performance in Britain.

Petrescu, Alina (2007) The Impact of Workplace Human Resource Management Practices on Company and Employee Performance in Britain. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Spanning thirteen years of British employee relations, and using three datasets with a total of over 80,000 observations, this thesis comprises three empirical studies of workplace practices. It focuses on the impact of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices on employee job satisfaction and on work effort, as well as analysing the relationship between training and promotion. Subjective constructs are deployed, positioning this research at the forefront of modem Labour Economics, while also attempting to bridge the HRM and Labour Economics literature. Original results include: the discovery of a consistently high and positive impact of employer-encouraged training and learning on job satisfaction and employee effort; the study of effort intensity; a contribution towards the setting of a research framework on effort; the use of a matched employee-employer data to analyse workplace employment relations; an inter-temporal analysis of training and promotion; the finding that returns to training in the extant literature are biased upward; and the finding that training and promotion with the same employer are positively associated. Several human resource management practices - in particular job autonomy, employee involvement and pay negotiation - and perceptions of pay inequality have highly significant effects on job satisfaction. Additionally, the thesis determines sets of practices that could lead to higher employee and workplace effort. The research agenda supported by this thesis can contribute to a more satisfactory and performance-enhancing workplace environment, hence to creating a stronger economy and to the achievement of higher societal well-being.