Contributions published at Empirical Research in Business, Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management (Uschi Backes-Gellner)

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A series of seminal papers argues that poaching hampers company-sponsoredgeneral training. Empirically, however, the existence and extent of poachingremain open questions. We provide a novel empirical strategy to identifypoaching. We find that only few apprenticeship training firms in Germanyare ‘poaching victims’ or ‘poaching raiders’. Victims are more likely to bein a temporary downturn and raiders are more likely to be growing. Victimshardly change their training strategy after poaching and poaching seems be atransitory event. This is an important result for countries that intend to introduceapprenticeship-type training and need to convince firms to participate in training.

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Because the extent to which multinational companies (MNCs) benefit from foreign subsidiaries depends on how effectively MNCs manage their foreign subsidiaries' workforce, the international management literature has long focused on how MNCs transfer Human Resource Management (HRM) practices. However, the literature has only vaguely dealt with institutional differences between host and home countries, often simplifying these differences under the umbrella of institutional or cultural distance. This article investigates how MNCs use expatriates to adjust subsidiaries' employment modes to different market economies. We define employment modes as bundles of HRM and industrial relations (IR) practices implemented at the firm level and examine the employment modes of 76 subsidiaries of US MNCs in a coordinated market economy (Germany), a hybrid market economy (Switzerland) and a liberal market economy (UK). Our results reveal substantial differences in the expatriation strategies of MNCs that depend not only on the international focus of the MNC but also on the differences in IR between the parent and subsidiary's environment. Our findings qualify the role of expatriates in adjusting subsidiaries' employment modes to different market economies and highlight the boundary conditions of integrating HRM with IR practices in the management of foreign subsidiaries.

The new training literature views regulated labour markets as critical for firms’ willingness to participate in apprenticeship training. These regulations allow training firms to retain their apprenticeship graduates at the end of the training period and recoup training costs. Yet, in spite of an only loosely regulated labour market, many Swiss firms offer and pay for training. Using representative data from a large employer–employee survey, we investigate whether these firms use performance pay to retain their graduates. We find that both the magnitude and the likelihood of performance pay are significantly related to a firm’s retention success.

Firms generate new knowledge that leads to innovations by recombining existing knowledge sources. A successful recombination depends on the availability of a knowledge stock (human capital pool) and the flow of knowledge within the firm (induced by HRM systems). While human resource theory expects complementarities between human capital pools and HRM systems, it does not explicitly address how knowledge exchange may be guaranteed or fostered. Moreover, empirical approaches neglect the complexity of such complementarities. In this study we develop a model that integrates a firm's knowledge stock and flow into a knowledge creation (KC) system comprising four ideal types. This system explains the occurrence of superior incremental innovation performance. We empirically analyze the KC system by applying fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and identify configurations concurring with our ideal types. The results show that the use of human capital and HRM practices depends on firm size and industry dynamism.

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This study empirically investigates whether the relationship between the fraction of filled apprenticeships in a particular occupation in the past and the fraction of prospective apprentices having very early intentions to train in this occupation has an impact on the decision to change the intended choice of occupation. We use a unique dataset from Switzerland containing detailed information on students’ early occupational ‘dreams’ (ages 13-14), before they undergo intensive career counselling, and combine it with information on their ultimate choice of occupation at the end of compulsory schooling (ages 15-16). The estimation results show that although the majority of students revise their initial intentions, those students who dreamed of learning an occupation with more training positions filled in previous years than peers interested in learning this occupation have a significantly higher probability of sticking to their initial dream occupation. Conversely, students who wished to train in an overly popular occupation have a higher probability of delaying the transition to upper-secondary education for at least one year, instead of switching to another occupation. In addition, we find on an aggregated level that a favourable situation on the apprenticeship market ultimately increases the premature contract termination rate due to a person-occupation-mismatch.

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