Middle Managers, Personnel Turnover and Performance: A Long-Term Field Experiment in a Retail Chain

Guido Friebel, Matthias Heinz () and Nick Zubanov
Additional contact information
Guido Friebel: Department of Management and Microeconomics, Goethe-University Frankfurt, 60323 Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Matthias Heinz: Department of Management, University of Cologne, 50923 Cologne, Germany

No 39, ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany

Abstract: In an RCT, a large retail chain’s CEO sets new goals for the managers of the treated stores by asking them “to do what they can” to reduce the employee quit rate. The treatment decreases the quit rate by a fifth to a quarter, lasting nine months before petering out, but reappearing after a reminder. There is no treatment effect on sales. Further analysis reveals that treated store managers spend more time on HR and less on customer service. Our findings show that middle managers are instrumental in reducing personnel turnover, but they face a tradeoff between investing in different activities in a multitasking environment with limited resources. The treatment does produce efficiency gains. However, these occur only at the firm level.

Keywords: organizations; randomized controlled trial (RCT); insider econometrics; goal-setting; communication; HR; personnel turnover and firm performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L2 M1 M12 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkdps/ECONtribute_039_2020.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Middle Managers, Personnel Turnover, and Performance: A Long‐Term Field Experiment in a Retail Chain (2022)
Working Paper: Middle managers, personnel turnover and performance: A long-term field experiment in a retail chain (2018)
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:ajk:ajkdps:039

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series from University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany Niebuhrstrasse 5, 53113 Bonn, Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECONtribute Office ().