This study uses personally collected data from 41 steel production lines to assess the effects of Japanese and U.S. human resource management (HRM) practices on worker productivity. The Japanese production lines employ a common system of HRM practices including: problem-solving teams, extensive...

Do human resource management (HRM) practices, such as incentive pay, teamwork, training, and careful screening practices, raise productivity, and if so, under what conditions does productivity rise? Recently, this question has been a central focus in organizational and personnel economics. We...

The authors investigate the productivity effects of innovative employment practices using data from a sample of thirty-six homogeneous steel production lines owned by seventeen companies. The productivity regressions demonstrate that lines using a set of innovative work practices, which include...

Increasingly, firms are considering the adoption of new work practices, such as problem-solving teams, enhanced communication with workers, employment security, flexibility in job assignments, training workers for multiple jobs, and greater reliance on incentive pay. This paper provides...

This paper investigates the individual and joint effects of group incentive pay and problem-solving teams on productivity. To estimate models of adoption of these work practices and models of the effects of the work practices on productivity, we constructed a data set on the operations of 34...

This paper compares the impact of new IT-enhanced technology on the efficiency of production in the U.S. and the U.K. for one manufacturing industry, valve manufacturing. There is a long-standing question of whether technological change and organizational changes have the same rates of adoption...

To study the effects of new information technologies (IT) on productivity, we have assembled a unique data set on plants in one narrowly defined industry-valve manufacturing-and analyze several plant-level mechanisms through which IT could promote productivity growth. The empirical analysis...

Using unique panel data on production lines in U.S. minimills, we analyze the adoption of problem-solving teams and group incentive pay and their effects on productivity. Almost every line ultimately adopts group incentives. However, problem-solving teams are found almost exclusively in lines...