Paying for Productivity: A Look at the EvidenceAlan S. Blinder Will higher pay provide an incentive for better work? Can productivity be increased by changing the way workers are compensated? In response to the urgent need to improve productivity performance in American industry, leading economists examine alternative compensation schemes to assess their efficiency in raising productivity. Over the years a number of suggestions have been made for improving labor productivity by changing the manner in which laborers are compensated for their efforts. The ideas presented and analyzed in this volume have all been put into practice, in modified form or on a small scale, in the United States or elsewhere. Some are new; others quite old. David I. Levine and Laura D'Andrea Tyson consider the effects of employee participation in decisionmaking on firm performance, and Martin L. Weitzman and Douglas L. Kruse discuss the implications of profit sharing and related forms of pay for group performance. Michael A. Conte and Jan Svejnar analyze employee stock ownership plans in the United States and other forms of worker ownership in Europe; Masanore Hashimoto uses a transaction-cost perspective to assess Japanese employment and wage systems. Daniel J. B. Mitchell, David Lewin, and Edward E. Lawler III give an overall analysis of traditional and alternative pay systems, their history, development, and curent use, and recommend further experimentation with alternative compensation plans to ensure more adaptability on the part of U.S. firms. Blinder provides an overview of the findings and conclusions. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Masanori Hashimoto | 10 |
Alternative Pay Systems Firm Performance and Productivity | 15 |
Managerial Attitudes toward Alternative Pay Systems | 63 |
Summary Statistics from Columbia Business Unit Survey | 76 |
Profit Sharing and Productivity | 95 |
Weitzman and Douglas L Kruse | 96 |
Surveys of Employee Attitudes | 116 |
Participation Productivity and the Firms Environment | 183 |
Levine and Laura DAndrea Tyson | 184 |
Employee Participation and the Firms External Environment | 204 |
Characteristics of Participatory Employment Systems Four Cases | 206 |
Conclusions | 235 |
Masanori Hashimoto | 245 |
Variability of Labor Inputs Wages and Bonuses | 259 |
Cyclical Sensitivity for Male Workers in Japanese | 260 |
Michael A Conte and Jan Svejnar | 130 |
The Performance Effects of Employee Ownership Plans | 143 |
15 | 145 |
Regression Results from the Conte and Tannenbaum Study | 157 |
Days Lost by Labor Disputes in Japan 195182 | 273 |
A Transaction Cost Theory of Industrial Relations | 278 |
Comment by Richard B Freeman | 294 |