Share capitalism and worker wellbeing

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

June 1, 2016

Summary:

We show that worker wellbeing is determined not only by the amount of compensation workers receive but also by how compensation is determined. While previous theoretical and empirical work has often been preoccupied with individual performance-related pay, we find that the receipt of a range of group-performance schemes (profit shares, group bonuses and share ownership) is associated with higher job satisfaction. This holds conditional on wage levels, so that pay methods are associated with greater job satisfaction in addition to that coming from higher wages. We use a variety of methods to control for unobserved individual and job-specific characteristics. We suggest that half of the share-capitalism effect is accounted for by employees reciprocating for the “gift”; we also show that share capitalism helps dampen the negative wellbeing effects of what we typically think of as “bad” aspects of job quality.

Published in

Labour Economics

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 42 , p.151 -158

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2016.09.002

ISSN

9275371

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

Open Access funded by Economic and Social Research Council

Under a Creative Commons license

#524552

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