Employee-oriented Management in the Competition for Skilled Labor: the Impact of Hr Measures on Perceived Work Quality and Turnover
Abstract: Given the developments associated with demographic change and digitalization, firms encounter serious challenges to meet their demand for qualified workers. An employee-oriented human resource management is often regarded as one cornerstone in the increasingly fierce competition for skilled labor. International analyses based on cross-sections provide evidence that a professionalized HR management is positively correlated not only with measures of economic success like value added, sales, and profit (Bloom und van Reenen, 2007) but also with work quality like work-life balance and affective commitment (e.g. Bloom et al. 2009, Alfes et al. 2013). Our analyses go beyond this approach by applying panel data and fixed effects estimation. Moreover, we address the link of HR measures not only with work quality but also with actual turnover of establishments. For this, we employ the Linked Personnel Panel (LPP), a unique biennial panel dataset comprising survey information on both employers and their employees from 2012 to 2016. We show that HR measures are positive correlated with job satisfaction, commitment, engagement and turnover intention. Regarding actual turnover on the establishment level, however, our results offer a more differentiated picture: Both performance-related measures for managers and perfor-mance-unrelated measures reduce subsequent turnover, whereas performance-related HR measures for employees without managerial responsibilities increase actual turnover.
