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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the determinants of employers' motives behind outplacement activities, the relationship between these motives, and the specific activities of firms in outplacement.

Theoretical assumptions were tested on a sample of 431 German firms, differentiating between specific outplacement activities and asking in detail about motives and rationales of outplacement. Factor analysis and Mann‐Whitney U‐Tests are applied.

Different types of motives can be identified and related to theoretical approaches. The relative importance of different motives is influenced by several situational and structural factors. The types of motives have an impact on the termination benefits offered to redundant employees.

Termination benefits are increasingly gaining importance, but the theoretical and empirical knowledge about the incidence, structure, motives, and effects of outplacement is still limited. This paper extends previous studies by shedding more light on the economic motives of employers to invest in outplacement activities, the determinants of these motives and the relationship between motives and specific bundles of activities.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how characteristics of the HR department and HR work, which relate to resource availability and resource needs, influence HR outsourcing. The study examines the subject of human resource (HR) outsourcing.

The potential influence of firms' characteristics on HR outsourcing is analysed theoretically and empirically. The dataset (n=1,021) covers a broad spectrum of personnel services and is based on computer‐aided telephone interviews with chief executives and human resource managers of German firms.

Generally, we find that firm size and previous reorganization activities significantly raise the probability of an HR outsourcing. In contrast, there is no overall significant influence of central characteristics of HR work or the HR department on HR outsourcing in general.

Although there is a trend toward the outsourcing of work, little research is being done on the relationship between the expected effects of outsourcing, the make‐or‐buy decision of decision makers, and the firm's characteristics themselves. This study sheds some more light on the relationship between HR outsourcing and firms' characteristics and finds some interesting relationships.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the influence of individual gender role specifications on objective career success (measured by gross yearly income) in the context of different gender job contexts whilst controlling for human capital and working time variables. Typical economic, sociological and psychological variables are combined to improve explanations of the gender wage gap.

Starting from Eagly and Karau's role incongruity theory, the paper derives hypotheses on the influence of gender role specification, gender job context and biological sex on gross yearly income. These hypotheses are analysed by logistic regressions with a data set from Germany. The paper presents results of a quantitative empirical survey of employees on wages, gender role-related self-descriptions and human capital variables.

The paper results show that even in this highly qualified sample, male biological sex, masculine gender roles and non-female job context have a positive effect on individual income. The results hold true when the paper controls for human capital, working time, professional experience and jobs in the public sector.

Because of the limited size of the data set and some problems with selectivity, the research results lack generalizability. Researchers are thus encouraged to test the propositions with other data sets.

The paper includes implications for wage design and for reaching wage equality in firms. An important implication for policy and practice is that under a gender and equal opportunity perspective, ensuring non-discriminating behaviour with regard to women may be only one (albeit an important) element of equal opportunity activities. Equal wage policies should further consider the gender characteristics of the job context, which may influence job-related roles and thus role incongruities. Additionally, individual interpretations of gender roles might have effects on wages. Human resource (HR) managers could support such policies by shaping job descriptions carefully with regard to gender role aspects, by influencing the gender composition of job contexts and by paying attention to the individual development of gender role interpretations in HR development programmes.

The paper fulfils an identified research need to study simultaneously the influence of human capital variables and gender roles on wages. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study, which studies the influence of gender roles as defined by Born (1992) on income in a German context of highly qualified individuals while controlling for human capital, working time and professional experience. The existing lack in the literature with regard to empirical analyses on the combined influence of economic, sociological and psychological variables is mitigated.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the relationship between HR outsourcing and service quality by focusing on motivational and incentive aspects.

The paper applies a game‐theoretic model of procurement decisions allowing for variable degrees of vertical integration and confronts the implications of its analysis with HR outsourcing data on a large sample of German firms.

The paper presents evidence for HR service quality being generally higher when procured from an external instead of an in‐house provider. Furthermore, the relationship between HR outsourcing and service quality is considerably stronger if the provided services are complex and if the potential for monitoring an internal provider is low.

The findings have immediate practical implications concerning the make‐or‐buy decision of HR services: the more complex the HR service under consideration and the lower the potential to monitor its in‐house provision, the more attractive is the external provision of HR services.

While most of the literature on HR outsourcing is based on transaction cost theory or follows a resource‐based approach, this paper uses a game‐theoretic model to analyse the make‐or‐buy decision of HR services, allowing the incentives of an internal or external provider to deliver high‐quality services to be focused on. Furthermore, for the empirical analysis the paper uses an original data set comprising more than 1,000 German firms.