Are Employee Selection and Incentive Contracts Complements or Substitutes?
Posted: 4 Mar 2016
There are 2 versions of this paper
Are Employee Selection and Incentive Contracts Complements or Substitutes?
Date Written: September 1, 2015
Abstract
There is a debate in the literature as to whether employee selection is a substitute or complement to incentive contracting. We argue that incentive contracts and selection can be both complements and substitutes conditional on the contracting difficulty faced by the firm. We examine these control choices in a setting where contracting difficulties arise due to the firm’s choice of strategy and from the volatility created by the firm’s external environment. We select a firm’s commitment to organizational learning (OL) as our strategic choice variable as this provides a useful proxy for identifying settings where explicit incentive contracting is difficult. The results show that as firms become increasingly committed to OL, incentive contracts and employee selection operate as complements. However, with a high commitment to OL and an increasing level of external volatility, contracting on performance measures will become less effective. In this context, our results indicate that there is a substitution effect toward employee selection.
Keywords: employee selection; incentive contracting; strategy; organizational learning; volatility
JEL Classification: D22; D23; D83; M41
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation