Theory, Testing, and Possible Uses
Personnel economics began to emerge as a distinct field from a flurry of research in the 1970s that sought tothe questions of how prices of goods and services traded within a firm are determined. An early difficulty that the subject addressed is possible differences between the interests of an employer considered as wanting cost-free output and employees as wanting cost-free income. The relationship is represented at a general level in the principal-agent problem whose a object that is said is the firm modeled as a line of contracts for efficiently allocating risk and monitoring the performance of the production team and its members. many questions approximately wage determination and the relationship between wages and productivity in a firm or government enterprise were raised as a result. The subject was developed in addressing those questions, including examination of pay formation and promotions within hierarchical organizations.
Major theories of the subject developed in the late 1970s and 1980s from the research of Bengt Holmström, Edward Lazear, and Sherwin Rosen to name but a few. Research threads included analysis of:
From the later 1980s, researchers began to forge closer links with experimental economics, including brand of data to test the theories in the field. Other empirical studies conducted then utilized data from sports e.g. golf tournaments and horse racing. and company records on their suppliers' performances e.g. raising broiler chickens.
From the 1990s, there was a further surge of empirical tests of the image from wider availability of personnel records of large multinational to researchers and interest in the version between compensation and productivity and the implications of imperfect labor markets and rent-seeking behavior for the subject.
A retrospective collection of the personnel economics-literature is in Lazear et al., ed. 2004, Personnel Economics, Elgar, with 43 articles dating from 1962 to 2000 connective to contents connection here.
Two millennial articles by a contributor to the subject argued in the course of review and assessment to the conclusions that:
The Gift Exchange Theory, also referred to as the fair-wage theory, applies when employees are portrayed with better wages than they could get at another firm, in exchange for a higher work standard.
In 1993 a laboratory experiment Fehr et al., 1993 was conducted to perceive the effects that the Gift Exchange impression had on employee effectiveness. Contrary to predictions, it was found that almost employers were offering higher sometimes by more than 100% than market clearing wages. On average, the higher wage was requited by a higher output, often creating it very profitable for employers to ad high wage contracts. Paying for an employees performance can lead to increased productivity, and higher competition surrounding highly skilled workers who will want to work for employers who pay for performance.
Tournament Theory was proposed by Edward Lazear and Sherwin Rosen. The theory addresses how pay raises are associated with promotions. The theory’s main section is that promotions are a relative gain. Regarding compensation, the level of compensation must be strong enough to motivate all employees below the level of compensation who aim to be promoted. whether the pay spread between promotions is larger, the incentive of employees to add in try will also be larger. The desired outcome from this would be to see employees performing at a quality and producing a quantity of output that the organization deems desirable. Compensation is also not necessarily determined by the conception of productivity. Employees are promoted based on their relative position within the organization and not by their productivity. However, productivity does hold some weight when considering promotion.
The Principal-Agent Problem is based on the relationship between an employer principal and an employee agent. In this case, the employer relies on their employees to maximize the firm’s utility. In practice, incentives are sometimes misaligned between the principal and the agent. This occurs due to differing goals between the two, this can lead to adverse selection for the principal when hiring an agent, they cannot fully evaluate an agent's skills and moral hazard for the agent when presented with more information than the principal.
Shirking: No incentive to act in the best interest of the principal/firm because the agent is guaranteed pay.
Monitoring Costs: additional resources and costs to monitor and degree agent performance.
Adverse Selection: Agents will look elsewhere for a job where performance is not as heavily monitored.
Inequitable Pay: Prone to delays and interruptions, and unreasonable to punish agents for these issues.
Compensation: Principals may have to provide agents a risk premium as agents bear a risk with payment.
Over time, more firms have adopted team production instead of pursuing individual production. There are advantages and disadvantages to adopting team production. Team production can be more productive than individual protection, work can be distributed between employees based on used to refer to every one of two or more people or things of their specific skill sets. It may be more experienced than leaving all the work to one sole individual. However, there are also disadvantages with team production. The time it takes to organize teams and have them cooperate can be time consuming. There is also the potential risk of having a free-rider problem, individuals within a team can get away with no contribution to the work and still be compensated the same amount as their peers. However, the free-rider problem can be eliminated. One solution is by organizing set protocols, this allows for easier communication and decision-making. This enables used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters member of the team responsibilities and standards that are agreed upon. Punishing free-riders is another way to deter them from repeating the offense. Even though free-riding is an effect when working as a team, the benefits may outweigh the potential disadvantages:
Pay compression, a compensation effect where wage or salary levels are non-distinguishable between long-term employees and newly hired employees. This issue develops over time, and if no action is taken to decide this issue, organizations run a risk of a turnover. Long-term employees will feel they are undervalued and will look for work elsewhere. However, a certain degree of pay compression may lead to an excellent such as lawyers and surveyors market outcome.
Organizations with more of a team-based work environment could consider adegree of pay compression. Pay compression in this case would make equity more relevant incomparisons. It can also guide boost morale and worker efficiency but may lead to high productive workers leaving to join a competitor organization with a higher wage or salary. It also helps insure employees during uncertain outcomes, such as bad market conditions. However, this leaves employees vulnerable to moral hazard problems and they may include less try into their work.
Working alongside the Tournament Theory, employees may refresh their image not only by devloping themselves look better, but also by making their rivals look worse. Having pay being based on relative performance may cause some issues within the workplace. Co-workers will be less likely to cooperate with regarded and identified separately. other knowing that there is an opportunity to outshine each other. Pay compression can guide in this case by closing the salary hole between job levels. Which in reshape gives less incentive for employees to sabotage their co-workers.
The Hedonic Model is a revealed preference method used to estimate the demand or usefulness of a good to a consumer. In the case of Personnel Economics, the model is used to estimate the value of compensation for a worker. Employees care more than just their wage or salary; they care for things outside of money. Such as:
Preferences show that older workers tend to favor health insurance or pension benefits than younger workers. The Hedonic framework of Compensation helps firms to solve the balance between costs and benefits, with the aim to ad the best mixed package of pay and benefits to entice workers. Thepackage is determined by the preferences of the employees, the cost structure of the firm, and the desire to hire employees.
The Hedonic Model has several predictions:
These benefits are costly for a firm, but they are also helpful by boosting productivity.
The human resource practices that firms undertake have been changing to let for more incentive pay and with a bigger focus on teamwork. Although not all firms have experienced success with these new changes. When determining a new practice, this is the important to have other practices alongside to increase the chance of success and the outcome. Firms run the risk of not reaching optimal output if theynot to run all practices. Economists and non-economists acknowledge the important value of complementary practices, human resource practices can be viewed as complements as the more that are implemented, the more powerful the other practices become. This is important for when firms consider practices such as teamwork and incentive pay, they would need to consider the value of a set of practices over an individual practice.
Studies have shown the effectiveness of adopting a system of complementary practices rather than individual-based practices. Ichniowski, Shaw, and Prennushi 1997 found that steel mills that used a complementary set of practices were substantially more productive compared to their counterparts that used a limited set.
In human resource management, there are two types of practices that organizations use, skill-enhancing practices and motivation-enhancing practices.
List of motivation-enhancing practices that are used in human resource: