Erik Poutsma

Radboud University | RU · Institute of Management Research

Compensation and benefit practices are mainly considered as instruments to align employee behaviour to an organization's strategic goals, such as economic outcomes. Going beyond this economic focus, this study examines whether and how employee financial participation, may drive corporate sustainability performance (CSP; i.e. social and environmenta...

In this paper, we assess the development of financial participation schemes, employee share ownership and profit-sharing in selected European countries and the degree to which they are correlated with strategic human resource management, and industrial relations, that is collective bargaining, unionization and works councils, and national context....

Background Previous studies on the effects of providing feedback about quality improvement measures to nurses show mixed results and the factors explaining the variance in effects are not yet well-understood. One of the factors that could explain the variance in outcomes is how nurses perceive the feedback. It is not the feedback per se that influe...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain how and why HR practitioners perceive the need to develop international HRM practices to support short-term assignments, international business travel and virtual assignments for internationally operating organizations. Design/methodology/approach The authors interviewed 29 HR practitioners from mult...

This study explores patterns of human resource management (HRM) practices across market economies, and between indigenous firms and foreign MNE subsidiary operations, offering a novel perspective on convergence and divergence. Applying institutional theorizing to improve our understanding of convergence/divergence as a process and an outcome, data...

This volume of Advances gathers recent insights into the determinants, developments, and outcomes of employee share ownership. It focuses on the numerous emerging themes in the literature and tests some of the relationships derived from the literature using several datasets, notably European ones. The result is a coherent set of chapters that disc...

Ziekenhuizen gebruiken in toenemende mate feedback over kwaliteitsindicatoren als instrument om de zorgkwaliteit te verbeteren. De onderliggende aanname is dat feedback over kwaliteitsindicatoren aan verpleegkundigen hen in staat stelt om hun eigen (manier van) werk(en) te beoordelen en aan te passen. Echter, een sterke focus op enkel kwantitatief...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer a timely assessment of the influence of human resource (HR) processes and policies on expatriates’ employability, using a Dutch international engineering firm as the study setting. Design/methodology/approach The qualitative study, based on in-depth interviews with 15 respondents in various roles, such...

This study investigates how nation-level cultural values (‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’) and intra-organizational task control mechanisms influence the level of organizations’ use of formal telework practices. Employing a multi-level analysis on survey data (2009/10), including 1577 organizations within 18 nations, we found that ‘high use of f...

Background: Providing nursing teams with feedback on quality measurements is used as a quality improvement instrument in healthcare organizations worldwide. Previous research indicated contradictory results regarding the effect of such feedback on both nurses' well-being and performance. Objectives: Building on the Job Demands-Resources model th...

Employee ownership in the Netherlands Employee ownership has not been very common in the Netherlands, although the numbers are increasing. It is not unlikely to become a key measure amidst developments around wealth inequality, robotization and flexible working arrangements. Also, it has business logic. Nevertheless, government, unions, and employe...

The idea to offer employees the opportunity to participate financially in their companies has enjoyed a considerable renaissance during the last decade. Pivotal for this renewed attention have without doubt been respective initiatives by the European Union, but also measures taken on the national level like, for instance, tax incentives for employe...

This paper investigated the effect of employee share ownership, mediated through psychological ownership, on organizational citizenship behavior. The analysis included the possible complementary role of High Performance Ownership systems. This paper investigated these relationships by analyzing employee survey data from a Dutch organization that ha...

This chapter broadens our understanding of the added value of employee financial participation. Financial participation is a generic term for the participation of employees in profit and enterprise results including equity of their employing firm. In general, there are two forms of employee financial participation: profit-sharing and employee share...

This article compares the spread of broad-based individual performance-related pay practices (PRP) in Central and Eastern European (CEE) and Western European companies. The article investigates the dominance effect of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the constraining effects of industrial relations, i.e. collective bargaining and union influenc...

This study investigates the relationship between broad-based financial participation plans (which target all employees) and financial performance, using a panel dataset of listed, companies (excluding financial institutions) during the period 1992–2009, comprising 2,153 observations. We make a distinction between broad-based profit sharing, share a...

Increasingly, hospitals use the data from their quality measurement activities, as feedback information for their nurses. It is argued that feedback on quality measurements can result in quality improvement at the expense of or for the benefit of nurses’ wellbeing. The proposed relationship is assumed to be mediated by (1) nurses’ attribution about...

Cultural intelligence (CQ) is an important construct attracting growing attention in academic literature and describing cross-cultural competencies. To date, researchers have only partially tested the relationship between CQ and its dependent variables, such as performance. In this study, the relationship between CQ and communication effectiveness...

This article investigates the relationships between human resource management practices associated with New Ways to Work (employee empowerment, home-based teleworking, and creating trust relationships) and work-related flow as experienced by employees (absorption, work enjoyment, and intrinsic work motivation). Hypotheses, based on a combined persp...

This contribution develops a conceptual framework that illustrates how feedback on quality measurements to nursing teams can be related to nurses' well-being and quality improvement. It is assumed that providing nursing teams with feedback on quality measurements will lead to quality improvement. Research does not fully support this assumption. Add...

Using Dutch data, we examine the characteristics of establishments that operate performance appraisal systems. Our estimates provide a couple of interesting results: (1) Multitasking and teamwork play a role in the use of performance appraisal systems. (2) While a shared corporate culture, the sharing of information, and a professional personnel ma...

For both academics and practitioners, an insight into the relationship between Human Resource Management (HRM) and performance is essential. In exploring this link, HRM scholars have arrived at a point where the universalistic approach of the performance effects of best HRM practices are criticized. In an effort to move beyond a best-practice mode...

Financial participation is a key human resource management practice, extending democracy at the workplace and, as the success of the organization becomes directly linked to employee rewards, altering the relationship between employees and the organization. In this chapter we discuss the incidence and characteristics of financial participation in ei...

Using a unique data set of more than 2800 organizations in 19 countries, this article investigated the variations in adoption of workplace work–family arrangements and whether this variation can be explained either by differences in welfare-state contexts or by organization-related factors. Although the welfare-state context contributed significant...

This exploratory paper provides preliminary evidence on the distribution of various forms of variable pay-by-pay determination structure. Data is drawn from the CRANET survey of company human resource practices, and is used for 13 countries. These countries are divided into two regimes, those where pay determination is predominantly centralized and...

This special issue aims to bring together contributions that take a dynamic approach to the development of financial participation, employee share ownership and profit sharing. The approach is premised on the notion that companies have ‘space’ to take a set of key decisions about financial participation. From different angles and experiences in dif...

This study investigates the relationship between financial participation plans, that is profit sharing, share plans and option plans, and firm financial performance using a longitudinal panel data set of non-financial listed companies for the period 1992-2009 comprising 2,216 observations. In addition, it makes a distinction between financial parti...

Purpose – This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the concept of “global management competencies”. Design/methodology/approach – An extensive review of most of the relevant literature on global management competencies was done. By investigating four constructs, i.e. the global mindset, cross‐cultural competence, intercultural sensiti...

Purpose This paper aims to introduce the theme of the special issue – diversity management beyond the business case. It addresses two main questions: first, how increased diversification within workgroups or labour is dealt with via diversity management, and second what the effects are of this increased diversity for group performance. Design/meth...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the work of the Dutch government's “Taskforce Part‐time Plus” set up to stimulate longer working hours for particularly Dutch women holding part‐time jobs of less than 24 h per week, to help counteract a predicted structural shortage of manpower. Design/methodology/approach – In 2009, t...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose an “extended conceptualization of the business case” including both organizational characteristics and institutional conditions to analyse employer involvement in extra statutory childcare and leave arrangements. Special attention is given to Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Design/metho...

Managers and employees need global leadership competencies in order to operate effectively in international business. In order to prepare both managers and employees for operating in the global arena an instrument measuring global leadership competencies would be very useful. In this article we design a framework for systematically assessing measur...

This chapter focuses on what the key decision makers in organizations decide after having received information on the current state of the organizational performance. Because of strong attributions to success and failure, it is impossible to predict in advance which concrete actions will occur. We can however find out what kinds of actions are deci...

This paper reviews the main strands of research on employee share ownership over the last forty years. It considers research findings in the literature on types of share ownership, the incidence of share ownership plans, the ‘determinants’ of the use of share plans by companies, influences upon employee participation in share plans, the effect of s...

Purpose This paper sets out to present a detailed empirical investigation of the entrepreneurial intentions of business students. The authors employ the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), in which intentions are regarded as resulting from attitudes, perceived behavioural control, and subjective norms. Design/methodology/approach The methodology us...

The impact of institutionalized contexts on the HRM activities of multinational firms has become a focus of increasing attention in recent literature. However, theories of how different types of business systems or market economies may influence HRM, and the impact of context on multinational corporations (MNCs) operating under these different cond...

This article assesses whether financial participation (profit-sharing and employee share ownership plans) is associated with positive performance outcomes, and whether direct and indirect employee participation complement financial participation in this respect. It also examines whether employee involvement in the design of financial participation...

This article embeds employee ownership within a strategic human resource management (SHRM) framework, and in so doing, aims to redress in part a lack of attention in previous employee ownership and SHRM literatures. The study extends the configurational approach to SHRM to include the construct of the workforce philosophy as the factor that determi...

The aim of this paper is to trace and explain variations in calculative and collaborative human resource management (HRM) practices between companies and across national borders. Variations and similarities are explained in terms of the convergence and divergence of HRM practices determined by national institutions, and the increasing influence of...

The central question of this article is whether or not effectiveness and efficiency are improved by the stronger reliance on markets given Dutch labour market institutions and their resulting corporatist wage formation. In answering this question, besides the influence on the production costs (neoclassical approach), we explicitly deal with and qua...

The debate on convergence and globalisation of national economies emphasises the role of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) with regard to the export of home-country policies in countries where they have their plants. MNCs set a process of change in motion in which local companies attempt to catch up with the more internationalised companies, partic...

This article explores the relationships between financial participation and other forms of participation drawing on data collected from listed companies in Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. The authors provide evidence on two questions. First, does the presence of either direct or indirect participation predict the use of profit sharing...

At the century's end the phenomenon of employee financial participation has gradually emerged as a ‘normal’ attribute of the employment relationship in important corners of the world and of the workforce. Covering such systems as profit sharing, employee share ownership and personnel stock option plans, employee financial participation is becoming...

This paper describes developments in broad-based financial participation of employees in their enterprises within the European Union (EU). Broad-based means that all or most employees are eligible for participation in the scheme, in contrast to selective schemes where only certain categories of personnel (in most cases higher staff and management)...

This article presents an overview of participation schemes in European companies. It is based on a secondary analysis of data from the 1996 EPOC mail survey among managers of profit sector establishments in 10 EU countries. The article describes the diverse extent and nature of participative workplaces in European countries. It analyses the interre...

This paper uses a substantial international database to provide the widest and the most detailed analysis to date of financial participation across Europe. It explores the antecedents of broad-based share ownership and profit sharing schemes. It is found that country effects are important predictors of both profit sharing and share ownership scheme...

The main objective of this contribution is to provide an account of the development during the 1990s of what has been called PEPPER. PEPPER is an acronym used by the European Commission that stands for Promotion of Employee Participation in Profit and Enterprise Results (including equity). This paper is based on a review of available international...

This article examines the incidence of financial participation across the European Union at the end of the 1990s. The main findings are that the incidence of both profit-sharing and share ownership differ considerably across member states and that this correlates broadly with the extent of differences in legislative and fiscal support for them. Oth...

This report presents an overview of practices on participation schemes in companies in different European countries. It is based on a secondary analysis of the 1996 EPOC-mail survey data among managers of profit-sector establishments in ten EU countries. The paper offers a description of the diversity of the extent and nature of participative workp...

Paradoxically, the notion of new work organizations has a long history, in particular in the Netherlands. To understand this, it is necessary to make a distinction between the accidental experiments with new forms of work, such as team-based working, on the one hand, and the acceptance of these ideas among the business community at large on the oth...

This article presents the major findings of a research project for the European Union on the development of promotion of employee ownership and profit sharing, known as PEPPER schemes, and the diffusion of these schemes throughout Europe. Since the first PEPPER report in 1991, the general situation of government policy on financial participation sc...

This article presents an overview of participation schemes in companies in different European countries. It analyses the interrelationships between two forms of participation schemes: first, schemes for direct participation of employees, namely consultation and delegation both on individual and group level; and second, schemes for financial partici...

This paper discusses research findings of a survey among Knowledge Based Firms. The reason for the survey was the growing interest of universities in the Netherlands to promote enterprise and spin-offs from their employees' knowledge-based activities. Insight into the entrepreneurship or the entrepreneurial basis of these started businesses is limi...

ERIK POUTSMA and Aad Zwaard are research associates at the Economic Research Institute for Small-and Medium-sized businesses in Zoetermeer, the Netherlands. This paper focusses on the effects of new technologies in small-and medium-sized industrial businesses. The study is based on a survey of 780 enterprises in different industries and three case...

Proefschrift : Beleidswetenschappen : Nijmegen : 1993.