ILR Articles and Chapters
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Item When Do Committed Employees Retire? The Effects of Organizational Commitment on Retirement PlansLuchak, Andrew A.; Pohler, Dionne; Gellatly, Ian R. (Wiley, 2008-09)The question of when committed employees retire is important to consider under a defined-benefit pension plan, which credits employees with benefits of lower overall value for retiring either too early or too late. We find employees with higher levels of affective commitment more likely to plan to retire later and past the age when it is most financially attractive for them to leave the organization. In contrast, employees with moderate to high levels of continuance commitment plan to retire earlier and at ages when it is most attractive for them to do so. Implications for HR policy and practice are discussed.Item Pensions as Psychological Contracts: Implications for Work OutcomesLuchak, Andrew A.; Pohler, Dionne (Wiley, 2010-01)Drawing on psychological contract theory, we develop predictions regarding the moderating influence of the meaning employees assign to their marginal quit costs, as well as on the role of stayer perceptions and saver effects, on various work outcomes under a defined-benefit pension. Results show pension incentives can have favorable or unfavorable effects depending on whether employees perceive them as supportive relational contracts or as low-trust transactional contracts. Implications for research and policy are discussed.Item The Human Resource Department's Role and Conditions That Affect Its Development: Explanations from Austrian CEOsBrandl, Julia; Pohler, Dionne (Wiley, 2010-11)Using a qualitative approach, this study fills a void in the literature on strategic HRM by analyzing Austrian CEOs' perceptions of the role of the HR department in their organizations, and the conditions that affect the development of a strategic role. The results suggest that even if CEOs have an overall positive evaluation of their HR departments and are willing to delegate responsibility for higher-level decision-making, to develop the HR department's role, CEOs must also feel they have the scope to do so. A framework for future research and practical implications for opportunities and constraints confronting HR managers are discussed.Item Balancing Interests in the Search for Occupational Legitimacy: The HR Professionalization Project in CanadaPohler, Dionne; Willness, Chelsea (Wiley, 2014-05)Despite broad debates surrounding how the human resource management occupation can increase its legitimacy, researchers have yet to examine the collective steps HR practitioners are taking in this regard and the extent to which they have been successful. We conduct a case study of the HR professionalization project in Canada via multisource qualitative and quantitative data, which we analyze using a unique integration of the trait and control models from the sociology of professions, as well as isomorphism from institutional theory. Viewed through the lens of these frameworks, we find that HR practitioners are attempting to emulate traits that define traditional notions of professions, and are aspiring to transcendent values associated with balancing the sometimes conflicting interests of employers and employees. Objective data from external stakeholders and institutions show that these collective strategies have been somewhat successful in garnering greater legitimacy thus far, particularly when comparisons are made with the HR professional project in the United States. We highlight numerous implications for future research and practice surrounding the legitimacy of the HR profession.Item Balancing Efficiency, Equity and Voice: The Impact of Unions and High Involvement Work Practices on Work OutcomesPohler, Dionne; Luchak, Andrew A. (SAGE, 2014-10)Theory and research surrounding employee voice in organizations have often treated high-involvement work practices (HIWPs) as substitutes for unions. Drawing on recent theoretical developments in the field of industrial relations, specifically the collective voice/institutional response model of union impact and research on HIWPs in organizations, the authors propose that these institutions are better seen as complements whereby greater balance is achieved between efficiency, equity, and voice when HIWPs are implemented in the presence of unions. Based on a national sample of Canadian organizations, they find employees covered by a union experience fewer intensification pressures under higher levels of diffusion of HIWPs such that they work less unpaid overtime, have fewer grievances, and take fewer paid sick days. Job satisfaction is maximized under the combination of unions and HIWPs.Item Governance and Managerial Effort in Consumer-Owned EnterprisesFulton, Murray; Pohler, Dionne (Oxford University Press, 2015-12)This article develops a political economy model of the board–manager relationship in consumer-owned enterprises (COEs), illustrating how the governance structure plays a key role in determining managerial power. The key conclusion of the article is that managerial remuneration and the resources devoted to governance are strategic choices for the COE and that their determination involves a trade-off. This trade-off depends on factors external to the COE, such as the COE's time horizon (as captured in the discount rate) and the manager's opportunity cost outside the COE (e.g. the remuneration paid in investor-owned firms). The trade-off also is influenced by the degree of complementarity between remuneration and governance resources, and by the sensitivity of managerial utility to financial remuneration and to governance.Item Are Unions Good or Bad for Organizations? The Moderating Role of Management's ResponsePohler, Dionne; Luchak, Andrew (Wiley, 2015-09)Union impact research has been hindered by an underdeveloped conceptualization of management response, contributing to inconclusive empirical findings. Integrating the collective voice/institutional response model with the appropriateness framework, we propose that an employee-focused business strategy is a critical moderating variable in the relationship between union density and organizational outcomes that mitigates the negative effects of unions and enhances the positive effects by sending a clear signal of management's intentions to co-operate. Using a panel dataset of Canadian organizations over six years, we provide empirical evidence to support our arguments. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.Item Does Pay-For-Performance Strain the Employment Relationship? The Effect of Manager Bonus Eligibility on Non-Management Employee TurnoverPohler, Dionne; Schmidt, Joseph A. (Wiley, 2016-06)We tested the organization-level effects of manager pay-for-performance practices on nonmanagement employee turnover within the context of agency theory and equity theory—two frameworks commonly applied to understand compensation policy and practice. We also propose an alternative theoretical perspective that predicts that managerial pay-for-performance policies may strain the employment relationship and increase nonmanagement employee turnover, unless there are HR practices that train and incentivize managers to treat employees well. We compare these alternative models to establish how well each framework explains the observed effects. Agency theory and equity theory receive limited empirical support in our lagged panel data set of organizations, whereas broader empirical support is established for the strain effect of manager pay-for-performance on the employment relationship. We discuss the implications of our findings for compensation theory, research, and practice.Item Strategic HR System Differentiation Between Jobs: The Effects on Firm Performance and Employee Outcomes.Schmidt, Joseph A.; Pohler, Dionne; Willness, Chelsea R. (Wiley, 2018-01)The purpose of this research was to understand whether firms apply different human resource management systems to different occupations within the same organization (HR differentiation) and how the extent to which they do so may influence firm and employee outcomes. We conducted two studies pertaining to these questions. The first study was based on data collected from managers, and the results suggest that firms differentiate their HR investments based on the strategic value of occupations to the firm, which was further associated with the human capital of those occupations. Differentiation in human capital was also associated with firm performance. The second study was based on data obtained from nonmanagement employees. The findings indicated that employees who were recipients of less HR system investment had lower fairness perceptions, which were further associated with higher turnover intentions and lower organizational citizenship behavior. Although the evidence from these studies suggests that firms may realize benefits from strategic HR system differentiation, managers should carefully consider how to balance the effects of differentiation on firm performance and employee well-being before implementing such systems.Item Multinationals' Compliance with Employment Law: An Empirical Assessment Using Administrative Data From OntarioPohler, Dionne; Riddell, Chris (SAGE, 2019-05)This study contributes new evidence to the literature on multinational corporation (MNC) behavior by exploring three related questions: 1) Do MNCs comply with local employment laws in a developed country? 2) To the extent that compliance varies across MNCs, what factors are important in shaping compliance? 3) Is there a “foreignness” effect for MNCs operating in developed countries, and does this effect vary according to country-of-origin and/or union status? To investigate these questions, the authors compiled unique firm-level administrative data on MNC compliance with regulatory and quasi-regulatory employment practices during mass layoffs in Ontario, Canada. Adopting a research design that uses the behavior of Canadian MNCs as the comparison group, their key findings suggest that unions are a very robust predictor of compliance across all foreign MNCs and systematic country-of-origin effects on MNC compliance are present only in non-unionized workplaces.