Staff Engagement, Job Complementarity and Labour Supply: Evidence from the English NHS Hospital Workforce

Giuseppe Moscelli, Melisa Sayli () and Marco Mello ()
Additional contact information
Melisa Sayli: University of Surrey
Marco Mello: University of Aberdeen

No 15126, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate the relationship among staff engagement, job complementarities and labour supply in the hospital sector, where excessive turnover of the clinical staff (doctors and nurses) can be detrimental for quality of care. We exploit a unique and rich panel dataset constructed by combining employee-level payroll and survey records from the universe of English NHS hospitals. System-GMM estimates remove the endogeneity bias due to reverse causality, revealing nurses' elasticities of retention with respect to engagement of 0.1 and 0.85, and doctors' elasticities of retention with respect to nurses' retention of 0.16 and 0.2, respectively within the hospital and the NHS. Estimates of unconditional quantile regressions confirm these findings, with nurses' engagement-elasticities as large as 1.4 for providers with low retention. Higher engagement is also beneficial to reduce staff absences. Our work is informative on the role played by staff engagement and labour supply complementarities in the workforce planning and management of large organizations.

Keywords: labour supply; workforce retention; staff engagement; job complementarities; healthcare organization; endogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 C36 I11 J22 J28 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60 pages
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15126.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15126

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().