Employer Strategies and Wages in New Service Activities: A Comparison of Coordinated and Liberal Market Economies

Abstract

Using survey data for call centre establishments in eight countries, we examine the relationship between wages and human resource practices. High-involvement work design and the use of performance-based pay are significantly positively related to wages, whereas intensive use of performance monitoring is negatively associated with wages. These relationships are larger among liberal economies compared with coordinated ones, but individual country differences are large and, in many cases, do not conform to expectations regarding institutional differences between liberal and coordinated market economies. The exception is Denmark.