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The Economic Costs And Benefits Of Self-Managed Teams Among Skilled Technicians, Rosemary Batt
The Economic Costs And Benefits Of Self-Managed Teams Among Skilled Technicians, Rosemary Batt
Rosemary Batt
This paper estimates the economic costs and benefits of implementing teams among highly-skilled technicians in a large regional telecommunications company. It matches individual survey and objective performance data for 230 employees in matched pairs of traditionally-supervised and self-managed groups. Multivariate regressions with appropriate controls show that teams do the work of supervisors in 60-70% less time, reducing indirect labor costs by 75 percent per team. Objective measures of quality and labor productivity are unaffected. Team members receive additional overtime pay that represents a 4-5 percent annual wage premium, which may be viewed alternatively as a share in the productivity gains …
Employee Voice, Human Resource Practices, And Quit Rates: Evidence From The Telecommunications Industry, Rosemary Batt, Alexander Colvin, Jeffrey Keefe
Employee Voice, Human Resource Practices, And Quit Rates: Evidence From The Telecommunications Industry, Rosemary Batt, Alexander Colvin, Jeffrey Keefe
Rosemary Batt
The authors draw on strategic human resource and industrial relations theories to identify the sets of employee voice mechanisms and human resource practices that are likely to predict firm-level quit rates, then empirically evaluate the predictive power of these variables using data from a 1998 establishment level survey in the telecommunications industry. With respect to alternative voice mechanisms, they find that union representation predicts lower quit rates, even after they control for compensation and a wide range of other human resource practices that may be affected by collective bargaining. Also predicting lower quit rates is employee participation in offline problem-solving …