Ingrid Smithey Fulmer

In modern organizations, key sources of competitive advantage are embedded in employees. Management theory has traditionally viewed employee exit as the end of firms’ relationships with employees and, consequently, the end of access to human capital and other resources embedded in departing individuals. However, recent research suggests that firms can benefit from the continuation of relationships with alumni employees. We argue that how organizations create and maintain connections to alumni is critical, as it shapes the nature of potentially valuable organization-level alumni resources. We develop a theory of firm value capture from alumni that explains how firms’ norms and policies before, during, and after employee exit affect firms’ alumni relations climate—a shared perception among a firm’s current and former employees that the firm values alumni. We further theorize that the alumni relations climate will lead to creation of firm-level alumni resources, with the configuration of these resources shaped by alumni identification. That is, the extent to which firms’ alumni identify with the firm versus with members of the firm’s remaining workforce (or balanced between the two) will have implications for the configuration of alumni resources that are potentially accessible to the firm. Our theory describes how these different alumni resource configurations come with inherent benefits and costs when it comes to the value that firms are able to capture from their alumni resources. We illustrate the value of this theoretical perspective by identifying meaningful practical implications and avenues for future research.

Due to external pressures organizations are confronted with the need to increase pay transparency and communication. However, there is limited research that has looked at when organizations are more likely to open up about pay. This study explores whether organizations report different levels of pay transparency depending on the characteristics of their variable pay systems. Using data from HR professionals at 400 organizations collected in a multi-country study, we investigated how proportion of variable pay, existence of group-level variable pay and use of objective and absolute performance criteria are associated with procedural variable pay transparency (i.e., transparency about how pay is determined), distributive variable pay transparency (i.e., transparency about actual pay levels) and variable pay communication restriction (i.e., discouraging employees from discussing pay among themselves). Overall, our results point to both external factors (i.e., country) and internal factors (i.e., variable pay system characteristics) that are associated with variable pay transparency.

In this paper, we undertake two primary tasks. First, we describe trends in pay → performance research since 1990. Examining 30+ years allows us to capture the evolution of thinking and methodology over time. For this purpose, we focus on scholarly work appearing inPersonnel Psychology (PP), as well as in theJournal of Applied Psychology(JAP) andAcademy of Management Journal(AMJ). As our second task, we go beyond analysis of broad trends, to take a deeper and more substantive dive into the specific topic of pay for performance (PFP) and related areas (pay dispersion, pay communication/transparency), while at the same time drawing on the broader literature on PFP that goes beyond the three journals listed above. We also discuss pay equity, endogeneity, and international issues. Finally, we suggest practical implications, as well as future research directions.

In this study, we theorize that chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) peer pay comparisons influence their decisions to engage in layoffs, and we consider the conditions under which layoffs deliver “payoffs” in the form of increases in subsequent CEO relative pay. Our results indicate that CEOs receiving compensation below their peers are significantly more likely to announce layoffs in the subsequent year, relative to those receiving compensation above their peers. Further, we find that the relationship between layoffs and subsequent changes in CEO relative pay depends on postlayoff changes in firm performance, with CEOs in firms with the largest performance gains receiving the largest increases in relative pay. We also show that our results are robust to an alternative operationalization of CEO relative pay. We provide evidence that external social comparisons may have predictable consequences for both CEOs’ propensities to engage in particular strategic actions and future changes in CEOs’ relative pay.

Idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) are individualized employment arrangements negotiated between organizations and particular employees (“i-dealers”). Most prior research has focused on the two parties to the i-deal, but in the current work, we focus on the co-workers of i-dealers who are often affected by the i-deals of others in ways that have additional and sometimes unexpected implications for organizations. We present a theoretically grounded framework that integrates cognitive, affective, and contextual processes to better understand when and why co-workers develop positive, neutral, or negative reactions to such arrangements. We predict that a range of reactions can occur, and may vary in valence (positive, neutral, or no reaction, or negative), degree of activation (active or passive), and target of the reaction (the organization, the i-dealer, or self). The nature of the reaction mirrors the emotions of the co-worker in response to self- and other-oriented cognitive appraisals of the i-deal by the co-worker. The nature of the reaction is also shaped by the consistency of the i-deal with the organization’s norms for differential treatment of employees. In the concluding section, we discuss future extensions and research implications of our model, and a number of potential managerial considerations that derive from our theorizing.

Prior research has generally found positive relationships between flexible work arrangements (FWAs) and employee attitudes. However, we know relatively little about organizational contingencies that affect the strength of these relationships, as there is little multilevel, multicompany research on FWAs. This study explores three aspects of employees' experience with FWAs—perceived availability of the number of FWAs, different types of FWAs, and actual use of FWAs—and their corresponding effects on employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Using a large multicompany data set (1,799 companies, 17,895 workers), we found that employees who perceive more FWAs available to them have higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment, especially in organizations that report offering fewer formal FWA policies. Among different types of FWAs, perceived availability of flexible scheduling is more positively associated with job satisfaction than flexible location and hours, and both flexible scheduling and location are more positively associated with organizational commitment than flexible number of hours. We also found that employees who actually use flexible scheduling have lower job satisfaction and organizational commitment than those who have it available but do not use it. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Prior research has generally found a positive relationship between flexible work arrangements (FWA) and employee attitudes. However, we know relatively little about organizational boundary conditions that affect the strength of this relationship, as there is little multi-level, multi-company research on FWA. Questions also remain about the relative effects of different aspects of FWA when multiple types FWA practices are considered simultaneously. This study explores three aspects of employees’ experience with FWA-- perceived availability of the number of FWA, different types of FWA, and actual use of FWA--and their effects on employee job satisfaction and organization commitment. Using a large multi- company data set (1,799 companies, 17,895 workers), we found that employees who perceive more FWA available to them have higher job attitudes, especially in organizations that report offering fewer formal FWA polices. Among different types of FWA, perceived availability of flexible scheduling is more positively associated with job satisfaction (although not with commitment) than flexible location and hours. We also found that employees who actually use flexible scheduling have lower job attitudes than those who have it available but do not use it. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Extensive prior research has found that, on average, people are more productive under properly designed incentive pay systems; this effect is not necessarily uniform across people, however. In two laboratory studies utilizing within-person study designs and tasks varying in level of structure, we examine how individuals’ personality dispositions systematically predict differential responsiveness to pay-for-performance (PFP) relative to fixed pay. As expected, average productivity was higher when people received PFP (in the form of piecework pay) than when they received fixed pay, but the productivity-enhancing effects of PFP were especially pronounced for more extraverted and less conscientious individuals in less structured tasks. Emotionally stable individuals also had enhanced productivity under PFP, an effect that has not been observed in previous research on personality and pay.

Despite managers’ claims that their organization’s human capital is their “most important asset,” few can confidently state the financial value of that resource or quantify in financial terms how changes in management practices, culture, or workforce composition affect the value of that resource. Scholars of strategic human capital and strategic human resource management face a similar situation, relying more on inferences about human capital resource value than on empirical measures of it. In an effort to explicate the challenges associated with financial valuation so that scholars can begin to move past them, we provide a multidisciplinary review of existing work that has been concerned with the estimation, disclosure, and management of the financial value associated with an organization’s human capital resources. We propose a multilevel organizing framework to facilitate the linkage between the financial valuation issues highlighted in our review and the recent literature on strategic human capital/strategic human resource management. Based on the insights drawn from this review, we then propose a series of next steps or “action items” to stimulate future research that holds promise for yielding both new theoretical insights and important practical implications for organizations.