It has been claimed that many workers in modern economies think that their job is socially useless, i.e. that it makes no or a negative contribution to society. However, the evidence so far is mainly anecdotal. We use a representative dataset comprising 100,000 workers from 47 countries at four...

It has been claimed that many workers in modern economies think that their job is socially useless, i.e. that it makes no or a negative contribution to society. However, the evidence so far is mainly anecdotal. We use a representative dataset comprising 100,000 workers from 47 countries at four...

A wide range of high involvement management practices, such as self-managed teams, incentive pay schemes, and employer-provided training have been shown to boost firms' productivity and financial performance. However, less is known about whether these practices, which give employees more...

Using survey data of public sector employees in the Netherlands, this paper shows that workers' satisfaction with various job domains not only affects whether but also where workers search for another job. An intuitive pattern emerges. Workers try to leave their current employer when their job...

This paper considers how the demand for non-material aspects of jobs evolves over changing wealth levels and how firms may want to react. We first consider the importance of non-material job aspects in general before turning to two specific human resource practices: flexible working hour...

In this paper we analyse the effects of arrangements that provide temporal and locational flexibility of work (TLF), namely flexi-time, telehomework, and part-time work, on employees' satisfaction with the fit between working time and private life and their overall job satisfaction. TLF...

Nearly all workers have a supervisor or 'boss'. Yet there is almost no published research by economists into how bosses affect the quality of employees' lives. This study offers some of the first formal evidence. First, it is shown that a boss's technical competence is the single strongest...

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...

There is an intrinsic link between the success of service firms and the availability of high-quality human resources, making employee attitudes and behaviors a critical concern for service organizations. This paper examines the role of generational differences in the relationship between...

Few studies investigate the links between high-performance work systems (HPWS) on public sector organizational performance and worker job attitudes. We fill this gap with analyses of these links using linked employer-employee surveys of workplaces in Britain in 2004 and 2011. We find robust...