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Having an interest in behaviour and attitudes at work, I had ideas, when appointed to the company, of involving employees in its affairs. However, the setting‐up of a works council in so small an organisation, where all the employees are known to me, seemed somewhat artificial. Every employee who wanted it already had access to the managing director! The works council idea was shelved. About a year ago the question of a bonus scheme was raised by employees. Earlier attempts to introduce bonuses in the company had been abandoned as being too difficult or too costly to install or run. An examination of various possibilities showed that an added value bonus scheme could be appropriate and had the great advantage of being participative in style. Here was a basis for employee participation with a genuine purpose. What follows describes how the scheme evolved and its effects so far.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of a particular low marginal-cost employee benefit on employees’ intended retention and performance. By utilizing a unique data set constructed by surveying full-time faculty and staff members at a public university in the USA, the authors study the impact of this employee benefit on faculty and staff performance and retention.

The authors focus on the impact of reduction in dependent college tuition at various levels on employees’ intentions to work harder and stay at their current job by using both OLS and ordered probit models. The authors also simulate the direct opportunity cost (reduction in revenue) in dollars and as a percent of total budgeted revenue to facilitate administrative decision making.

The results provide evidence that for institutions where employee retention and productivity are a priority, maximizing or offering dependent college tuition waiver may be a relatively low-cost benefit to increase retention and productivity. In addition, the amount of the tuition waiver, number of dependents and annual salary are statistically significant predictors of intended increased productivity and intent to stay employed at the current institution.

Employee retention and productivity is a challenge for all organizations. Although pay, benefits and organizational culture tend to be key indicators of job satisfaction, little attention is given to specific types of benefits. This study is the first comprehensive attempt to explore the relationship between the impact of this low-cost employee benefit and employee performance and retention in a higher education institution in the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to reconcile various theoretical directions in employee engagement with self-determination theory (SDT) as a unifying framework and introduce an inter-disciplinary employee engagement economics model based on SDT.

Two studies were conducted applying a T1/T2 intervention study design. Study 1 examined the causal relationship between an organizational intervention and employee engagement with n=367 employees from a European pharmaceuticals company using both survey and actual performance data. Study 1 results were used as input data for study 2 which tested the employee engagement economics model by calculating the pre-/post-economic value added and return on investment (ROI) for the intervention.

Study 1 results showed a significant positive impact of the SDT-based intervention on both self-reported and actual employee engagement. Study 2 converted study findings into pre-/post-economic considerations putting an economic dollar value on achieved employee engagement gains and calculating an ROI in relation to the cost incurred.

The present results support SDT as a unifying theory for employee engagement and the proposed employee engagement economics model as strategic decision-making tool for planning and evaluating the economics of employee engagement interventions.

This research supports a shift in corporate focus from “people as cost” to “people as values” proposing a systematic, value-based, strategic management approach to employee engagement based on cost-benefit analysis.

This is the first research to contribute an empirical economic model for employee engagement interventions to literature. It is based on the first reconciliation of engagement literature identifying SDT as a unifying framework. Finally, for the first time, this work identifies subjective vitality as a measure for engagement and contributes a definition for disengagement to literature.

Examines employees′ attitudes towards the value of sharing the costs of health care benefits. Argues that heightened employee awareness of value of these benefits will not necessarily result in the positive attitude changes envisioned by employers. Suggests that equity theory may serve as a reasonable model for considering how employees may respond to health sharing proposals. Cautions employers to reconsider the projected cost savings and potential negative behavioural consequences of such strategies.

This paper aims to provide a literature review of corporate wellness programs to develop recommendations for effective internal marketing of healthy behaviors in work environments.

A review of research literature published since 2000 addresses corporate wellness programs’ justifications and best program design practices.

Corporate and employee benefits documented in the literature are reviewed and best practices from published literature are identified to guide the design of wellness programs. These include framing clear messages, alignment of corporate culture and business strategy with wellness program goals, senior leader support, clear objectives and evaluation, incorporation of peer support and enjoyable activities, utilization of effective priming for healthy choices and consideration of legal and ethical incentives.

Further research is needed, including how to frame messages for diverse work groups, how to carry out effective program assessments, what types of marketing appeals are effective, what wellness activities lead to healthy behavior change and how is increased employee productivity related to quality of life. Additional questions include how priming encourages healthy behaviors, what promotes healthy workplace cultures and what social marketing appeals promote healthy behaviors.

Senior managers can implement findings to create effective wellness programs benefiting employees and firms through improved employee health and productivity and reduced corporate health-care costs.

Effective wellness programs reduce overall health-care costs for society and provide improved participants’ quality of work, personal and family life.

This research uniquely applies internal marketing, social marketing and marketing exchange concepts to best practices from the wellness literature and applies these to recommendations for effective corporate-based wellness programs.

Firms grant non‐tradable stock options to their employees as an incentive device. Is the cost of issuing these options equal to the amount the company would receive if it sold the same options to outside investors? The evaluation of this cost is the main objective of this article. The options granted to employees are not tradable, due to the incentive scheme to which they are related. A non‐tradable option is an asset that cannot be evaluated with standard Black‐Scholes formulas.

The article adopts standard option pricing, introducing some corrections since Black‐Scholes formulae do not apply. The new formulae show the dependence of option values on how diversified both the employees and the firm are; and the influence that the incentive to work by employees has on the stock price.

Once stock options satisfy a participation constraint, they can be granted to employees who stand to gain. However, they do not provide a net benefit in all circumstances to shareholders since they may gain, break even, or lose. Even though in many cases stock options may appear to be an inefficient way to stimulate work effort, in start‐ups and entrepreneurial firms they turn out to be quite beneficial.

Stock option opportunity costs have to be valued taking into account the extent of their non‐tradability and the incentive they provide to employees.

The article introduces a correction for valuing non‐tradable stock options. This permits us to measure properly the opportunity cost of stock options, which is often mis‐specified.

This paper analyzes the impact of economic downturns on the revenue and expense sides of city financing for the period 2003 to 2009 using a convenience sample of the audited end of year financial reports for thirty midsized US cities. The analysis focuses on whether and how quickly and how extensively revenue and spending directions from past years are altered by recessions. A seven year series of Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) data serves to explore whether citiesʼ revenues and spending, especially the traditional property tax and core functions such as public safety and infrastructure withstood the brief 2001 and the persistent 2007 recessions? The findings point to consumption (spending) over stability (revenue minus expense) for the recession of 2007, particularly in 2008 and 2009.

As the tourism industry emerges from full or partial closure caused by the COVID-19 crisis, it is imperative to understand the internal conditions that assisted organizations to maintain positive employee attitudes despite the adverse effects of unpopular cost–retrenchment strategies. Therefore, this study aims to understand the impacts of transformational leadership (TFL), human resource management (HRM) crisis cost–retrenchment and ethical climate (EC) on employee job outcomes affected by COVID-19 pandemic.

Mid-level managers of service organizations from a travel destination heavily reliant on the tourism participated in an online self-administered survey one month after the state eased its COVID-19 travel restrictions. Partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) examined how TFL and EC influenced cost–retrenchment crisis–management HRM, satisfaction and trust in the organization, followed by PLS multi-group analysis (PLS-MGA) to understand differences between hospitality and non-hospitality employees.

Results revealed an overall positive effect of TFL that diminished the negative affect of HRM cost-retrenchment on employee satisfaction. PLS-MGA showed a significant positive role of other-focused EC on employee outcomes, especially for hospitality organizations, whereas self-focused EC had a negative impact for non-hospitality firms.

This study contributes to contingency theory of leadership by demonstrating that TFL in combination with EC mitigates or overpowers the negative effects of cost–retrenchment crisis management strategies on employees. The study advances knowledge of self-focused and other-focused moral reasoning climate impacts under COVID-19 conditions for hospitality organizations. The industry comparison results highlight the important positive characteristics of hospitality crisis management.

Employee theft is a major component of retail shrinkage. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of two methods, internal control and random inspections of the locations at which employees work, to deter employee theft. An inspection strategy is designed in which retailers try to minimize their costs while trying to prevent employees from stealing.

We employ an analytical approach. The employees are assumed to be strategic, i.e. they respond to the decisions made by the retailer, and likewise the retailer is strategic. Consequently, game theory is used to model their interaction, and to obtain the best decisions for both the retailer and employee after taking into consideration the other's actions.

The solution of the game depends upon various parameters such as the cost and effectiveness of random inspections and of the internal control system. The paper determines the optimal frequency of inspections, the total budget to be spent on inspections and the total expected retail shrinkage due to employee theft. The paper also shows the extent to which an effective internal control system and the recruitment of honest employees can benefit retail organizations in preventing losses due to employee theft.

The paper provides normative guidelines for decisions such as the frequency of inspections. Retailers can limit employee theft but eliminating theft altogether turns out to be too expensive if the goal is to minimize organizational losses. The retailer should try to reduce inspection costs and increase their effectiveness. Adding honest employees helps the retailer, but note that adding just a few is not beneficial because organizational losses remain unchanged, but adding a larger number qualitatively affects the equilibrium outcome and lowers organizational losses. The paper describes when investing in better internal control systems is appropriate.

The underlying assumption is of strategic retailers and employees. This gaming analysis brings a new perspective to examining retail crime problems than has been hitherto the case. This work follows in the tradition of the economics of crime literature, which views crime as a rational choice decision made by potential offenders. The study examines employee crime in the context of retail organizations, and provides several new insights. Although the idea of random inspections is not new, features of the retail environment such as internal control system, employee dissatisfaction and the ability to recruit honest employees have no direct parallels in the economics of crime literature, and are being touched upon for the first time.

In this chapter, the authors examine the turnover of employees in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico. Employee turnover is important in Latin America and in Mexico, as it is in many other places, because the cost of labor typically accounts for 70% of a firm’s operating cost. When employees leave, it requires that the employer replaces the workers through human resource management processes that include recruiting, selection, orientation, and training. These costs are a significant expense to firms that they could avoid if turnover was lower. The authors identify cultural, economic, legal, and other factors that could influence employee turnover. The authors also summarize many managerial practices that can help employers to effectively manage employee turnover. Finally, the authors provide insights for future research on employee turnover in this important region of the world.