Adverse Workplace Conditions, High-Involvement Work Practices and Labor Turnover: Evidence from Danish Linked Employer-Employee Data

Elena Cottini (), Takao Kato and Niels Westergård-Nielsen ()

No 4587, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper contributes to the emerging strand of the empirical literature that takes advantage of new data on workplace-specific job attributes and voluntary employee turnover to shed fresh insights on the relationship between employee turnover, adverse workplace conditions and HRM environments. We find evidence that workers in hazardous workplace conditions are indeed more likely to separate from their current employers voluntarily while High-Involvement Work Practices (HIWPs) reduces employee turnover. Specifically, exposing a worker to physical hazards such as loud noise, vibration or poor lighting will lead to a 3 percentage point increase in the probability of turnover from the average turnover rate of 18 percent; working in a fixed night shift will result in an 11 percentage point jump in the turnover probability, and having an unsupportive boss will lead to a 5 percentage point increase. The effect of HIWPs is modest yet hardly negligible with a 4 percentage point reduction in the turnover probability from having voice in the workplace. Furthermore the turnover-increasing effect of physical hazards is found to be significantly reduced by the presence of strong information sharing whereas the adverse effect on turnover of the use of fixed night shift is also found to be significantly mitigated by the authority delegation to workers by management. As such, our evidence lends support to those who advocate the use of HIWPs for those firms with employee turnover problems due to hazardous workplace conditions. Finally, our logit analysis of the 5-year odds of improving workplace conditions suggests that the worker exposed to adverse workplace conditions can improve her long-term odds of rectifying such workplace adversities significantly by separating from the firm voluntarily. Voluntary turnover appears to be a rational worker response to adverse workplace conditions, and unless the firm alleviates its adverse workplace conditions directly or mitigates their effects on voluntary turnover through HIWPs, workers exposed to adverse workplace conditions will likely continue to take the exit option.

Keywords: employee turnover; workplace conditions; human resource management; high-involvement work system; high-performance work system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J28 J5 J63 J81 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2011, 18 (6), 872-880

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4587.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Adverse workplace conditions, high-involvement work practices and labor turnover: Evidence from Danish linked employer–employee data (2011)
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:dp4587

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 ().