We investigate the relationship of "shared capitalist" compensation systems - profit/gainsharing, employee ownership, and stock options - to the culture for innovation and employees' ability and willingness to engage in innovative activity. Using a large dataset with over 25,000 employee surveys...

Some analysts view risk as the Achilles Heel of employee ownership and to some extent variable pay plans such as profit sharing and gainsharing. Workers in such "shared capitalist" firms may invest too much of their wealth in the firm, contrary to the principle of diversification. This paper...

Between one-third and one-half of employees participate directly in company performance through profit sharing, gainsharing, employee ownership, or stock options. This flies in the face of concerns about the free rider problem and worker risk aversion in group incentives, and raises many...

This paper analyzes the linkages among group incentive methods of compensation, labor practices, worker assessments of workplace culture, turnover, and firm performance in a non-representative sample of companies: firms that applied to the "100 Best Companies to Work For in America" competition...

What enables some employee ownership firms to overcome the free rider problem and motivate employees to improve performance? This study analyzes the role of human resource policies in the performance of employee ownership companies, using employee survey data from 14 companies and a national...

This paper examines cross-country differences in labour policies and practices and employee performance and attitudes toward work from a sample of nearly 30,000 employees in a large multinational manufacturing firm. The analysis shows: 1) large establishment and country differences in work...

Employee ownership in U.S. companies has grown substantially in the past 20 years. This paper reviews and provides some meta-analyses on the accumulated evidence concerning the prevalence, causes, and effects of employee ownership, covering 25 studies of employee attitudes and behaviors, and 27...

Group incentive systems have to overcome the free rider or 1/N problem, which gives workers an incentive to shirk, if they are to succeed. This paper uses new questions on responses to shirking from the General Social Survey and a special NBER survey of workers at over 300 worksites in 14...

Existing research tends to show that profit-sharing plans for employees are associated with higher company productivity and profitability, though the causality and mechanisms are unclear. This study uses new data from a survey of 500 U.S. public companies, and panel data on corporate...

The relative decline of defined benefit (DB) pension plans, and growth of defined contribution (DC) plans, has been often noted but not extensively explored. This paper reports on the construction of a new longitudinal company-based dataset on pension plans for the years 1980-86 (including all...