We study the impact of and reward to middle management ability using data from 245 stores of a nationwide retailer. The company scores six broad areas of management practice, the most important of which turns out to be "commercial awareness", where able managers raise labour productivity by 17%...

The goal of this study is to examine whether women in the highest levels of firms' management ranks help reduce barriers to women's advancement in the workplace. Using a panel of over 20,000 private-sector firms across all industries and states during 1990-2003 from the U.S. Equal Employment...

Wage gaps between workers with a college or graduate degree and those with only a high school degree rose rapidly in the United States during the 1980s. Since then, the rate of growth in these wage gaps has progressively slowed, and though the gaps remain large, they were essentially unchanged...

Using nationally representative workplace data we find substantial use of high-performance work systems (HPWS) in Britain's small enterprises. We find empirical support for the proposition that HPWS have a non-linear association with employees' overall job attitude, with a positive association...

Using multilevel mixed effects ordered logistic models, this paper conducts an original investigation of the new management as a technology approach for all EU nations in a framework that explicitly recognizes worker representation while incorporating the notion of affective commitment. It is...

A long-running debate in the small firms' literature questions the value of formal 'human resource management' (HRM) practices which have been linked to high performance in larger firms. We contribute to this literature by exploiting linked employer-employee surveys for 2004 and 2011. Using...

Linking the Workplace Employment Relations Surveys 2004 and 2011 to administrative data on pupil attainment in England we examine whether secondary and primary schools who deploy more intensive human resource management (HRM) practices have higher pupil attainment. We find intensive use of HRM...

Using nationally representative linked employer-employee data for Britain in 2004 and 2011 we find school staff are more satisfied and more contented with their jobs than "like" employees in other workplaces. The differentials are largely accounted for by the occupations school employees...

There is a perception among some commentators and policy analysts that leadership and managerial practices in private schools are superior to those in state schools. Analysing a survey of workplaces in Britain, we find little evidence to support this contention when examining the prevalence of...

Evidence on schools' performance is confined to comparisons across schools, usually based on value-added measures. We adopt an alternative approach comparing schools to observationally equivalent workplaces in the rest of the British economy using measures of workplace performance that are...