Measuring the use of human resources practices and employee attitudes. The Linked Personnel Panel

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/EBHRM-09-2015-0037
Published date01 August 2016
Date01 August 2016
Pages94-115
AuthorPatrick Kampkötter,Jens Mohrenweiser,Dirk Sliwka,Susanne Steffes,Stefanie Wolter
Subject MatterHR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM
Measuring the use of human
resources practices and
employee attitudes
The Linked Personnel Panel
Patrick Kampkötter
Department of Management, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Jens Mohrenweiser
Faculty of Management, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK
Dirk Sliwka
Department of Management, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Susanne Steffes
Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW),
Mannheim, Germany, and
Stefanie Wolter
Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung der Bundesagentur für Arbeit
(IAB), Nuremberg, Germany
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new data source available for researchers
with interest in human resources management (HRM) and personnel economics, the Linked Personnel
Panel (LPP).
Design/methodology/approach The LPP is a longitudinal and representative employer-employee
data set covering establishments in Germany and a subset of their workforce and is designed for
quantitative empirical human resource research.
Findings The LPP employee survey applies a number of established scales to measure job
characteristics and job perceptions, personal characteristics, employee attitudes towards the organization
and employee behaviour. Thispaper gives an overview of boththe employer and employee survey and
outlinesthe definitions,origins, and statisticalpropertiesof the scales used in the individual questionnaire.
Practical implications The paper describes how researchers can access the data.
Originality/value First, the data set combines employer and employee surveys that can be matched
to each other. Second, it can also be linked to a number of additional administrative data sets. Third,
the LPP covers a wide range of firms and workers from different backgrounds. Finally, because of its
longitudinal dimension, the LPP should facilitate the study of causal effects of HRM practices.
Keywords HR practices, Linked employer-employee data, Linked Personnel Panel
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
One of the key interests of human resources management (HRM) researchers and
personnel economists is to study the use and usefulness of HRM practices, taking into
account the variety of contexts in which firms operate. Such evidence-based HRM
requires detailed information about the status quo of practices used in firms, which is
often collected through firm-level surveys. In management research, scholars have
already for quite some time studied the connection between the use of so-called
high performance work practices, i.e. combinations or bundles of HRM practices, and
Evidence-based HRM: a Global
Forum for Empirical Scholarship
Vol. 4 No. 2, 2016
pp. 94-115
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
2049-3983
DOI 10.1108/EBHRM-09-2015-0037
Received 2 September 2015
Revised 20 October 2015
Accepted 27 October 2015
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2049-3983.htm
94
EBHRM
4,2
employee attitudesand firm performance, typicallywith quite mixed results (e.g.Huselid,
1995; Combs et al., 2006; Subramony, 2009). More recently, economists have also started
to conduct large-scalesurvey studies to investigate the connectionbetween management
practices and firm performance (Bloom and Van Reenen, 2007, 2010). However, due to
the mainly cross-sectional nature of the used data sets, these studies typically cannot
establish causal effects. Moreover, these studies frequently use firm-level data, which
often does not permit the identification of channels through which changes in human
resource (HR) practices affect employee attitudes and behaviour.
In order to facilitate the identification of causal effects, a longitudinal dimension is of
substantial importance to track changes in the use of these practices overtime. As HR
practices aim at affecting firm performance by changing employeesattitudes and
behaviour, an analysis of their impact should ideally also take both the employer and
employee perspectives into account.
This paper introduces a new data set that meets these requirements: the Linked
Personnel Panel (LPP). The LPP is a longitudinal linked employer-employee survey[1]
that is representative for German private sector establishments with 50 or more
employees. The LPP links employer-level information about HR policies with employee-
level information about attitudes and behaviour, enabling researchers to analyse how
individuals perceive their work and how they respond to HR policies. The longitudinal
dimension of the LPP further facilitates the analysis of causal effects of HR policies on
various outcome measures by eliminating time-constant unobserved variables.
This paper introduces the design and sampling of the first wave of the employer and
employee survey. It describes in detail the definitions, origins, and the statistical
properties of the survey items used to assess job and personal characteristics, as well as
attitudes and behavioural variables in the employee survey.
For the employer survey, managers of 1,219 establishments provided detailed
information about a broad variety of HRM practices and a number of firm
characteristics. For the employee survey, a total of 7,508 employees working in these
establishments were interviewed via telephone about job characteristics and job
perceptions, personal charact eristics, attitudes towards the ir organization and
behavioural variables. A unique feature is the possibility to link both dimensions of
the LPP to various external administrative data sets and enrich the available
information across a number of dimensions.
The employee survey adapts a number of items from well-established scales widely
used in the literature. The measures incorporate job characteristics and perceptions
such as work design, supervisory support, perceived fairness, clarity of organizational
goals, reward structure, and work-family an d family-work conflicts. Personal
characteristics comprise personality (Big Five), risk attitude, trust, and a number of
socio-demographic variables. Attitudes include work engagement, affective
commitment, and job satisfaction. Behavioural variables comprise turnover intention,
sickness absence, and in later waves, real turnover.
2. Construction of the LPP data sets
This section briefly describes the sampling and construction of the LPP. The LPP was
created in response to an enquiry of the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social
Affairs within the project Arbeitsqualität und wirtschaftlicher Erfolg(Quality of
work and economic success). The project and data set are administered at the Institut
für Arbeitsmarktforschung, Institute for Employment Research (IAB), and the
questionnaires were jointly designed by the Centre for European Economic Research
95
The Linked
Personnel
Panel

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