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The Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management, edited by Peter Boxall, John Purcell, and Patrick Wright, is reviewed.

Although there is substantial evidence that, on average, employee profit sharing improves company performance, little is known about the conditions under which it does so or the mechanisms through which it operates. This study identifies possible consequences and moderators of profit sharing, and then utilizes a data set from 108 Canadian profit-sharing firms to empirically examine them. Virtually all of the predicted consequences emerged, although to varying degrees. Three main factors moderated their emergence. Results were significantly more favorable in firms that had a high involvement managerial philosophy, that communicated extensively about profit sharing, and that allocated the profit-sharing bonus according to measures of individual employee performance.

The article reviews the book, "Profit Sharing : Does it Make a Difference?," by Douglas L. Kruse.

The article reviews the book, "Crossing the Line: Unionized Employee Ownership and Investment Funds," by Jack Quarter.

In recent years, both profit sharing and employee ownership have experienced a dramatic resurgence of interest in most western countries. As companies have attempted to find ways of dealing with difficult economic circumstances and increased global competition, they have become receptive to these concepts. However, both types of plans find opponents within the labor unions. A recent study describes the incidence and general nature of employee profit sharing and share ownership in Canada, based on telephone interviews with chief executive officers of 626 Canadian firms conducted during 1989 and 1990. The results indicate that there has been a dramatic growth in both of these during the past decade, despite the absence of strong legislative support, and that this growth will likely continue for some time.

The article reviews the book, "Understanding Employee Ownership," by Corey Rosen and Karen M. Young.

The article reviews the books, "he Origins of Economic Democracy: Profit Sharing and Employee-Shareholding Schemes," by Michael Poole and "The Impact Of Economic Democracy: Profit Sharing And Employee Shareholding Schemes," by Glenville Jenkins.

A study seeks to explain why companies do or do not introduce employee profit sharing, through a telephone survey of CEOs at 626 Canadian companies. In addition to examining some of the usual contextual variables, the study goes beyond previous work by directly questioning CEOs about their motives for adopting or not adopting profit sharing, and by including managerial philosophy as a possible factor in their decision-making process. Results indicated that managerial philosophy and company size were the 2 key predictors of incidence or profit sharing. However, the firms most likely to adopt profit sharing in the future were those experiencing a high growth in sales coupled with a low growth in employees. Surprisingly, unionization was not related to either presence of, or intention to implement, profit sharing.

Reviews the book 'Human Resource Development and Information Technology: Making Global Connections,' edited by Catherine M. Sleezer, Tim L. Wentling and Roger L. Cude.

This paper reports the results of a large-scale Canadian survey of nine types of workplace innovation — profit sharing, gain sharing, pay for knowledge, job sharing, job enrichment, semi-autonomous work groups, quality circles, labour management committees, and 'other' joint problem solving groups. The paper assesses the incidence ofeach type, patterns of implementation, survival rates, and trends over time.

This article reviews the book, "Developing Employee Relations," by Peter Warr, Stephen Fineman, Nigel Nicholson & Roy Payne.

This article explores the relationship between employee ownership and attitudes toward the union by reporting the results of an empricial study of a unionized Canadian trucking company recently purchased from its former corporate owner by most of its workers and managers. Results indicated that most workers— both union and non-union— did not believe that unionization was either incompatible with employee ownership or unnecessary.

This paper examines the impact of unions on employment growth in a longitudinal sample of Canadian workplaces collected during the period 2001-2006. To facilitate comparability with earlier Canadian results, we segment our analysis by industrial sector and establishment size, and find that unions suppress employment growth only in larger manufacturing establishments, and actually seem to promote employment growth among smaller service sector establishments. These results differ substantially from results found twenty-one years previously. We extend previous analysis by examining whether a declining union wage premium may have played a role in these results, and find suggestive evidence for such a contention.

This paper examines the changing pattern of worker participation in organizations during recent conditions of economic down-turn. The authors conclude that the current recession has served as a catalyst to force many organizations and their members to recognize that traditional management approaches and resulting employee responses have become increasingly inadequate in the light of wider social changes, and that there is more support for an «evolutionary ratchet» as opposed to a «cyclical» notion of participation.

Using panel data from a large sample of Canadian establishments, the authors examine whether there is any link between adoption of an employee profit-sharing plan and subsequent employee earnings. Overall, growth in employee earnings during the five-year period subsequent to adoption of profit sharing was significantly higher in establishments that had adopted profit sharing, as compared with those establishments that had not done so. Employees in establishments that paid high wages before profit sharing adoption appeared to benefit more than employees in other establishments, although employees in other establishments did eventually benefit from profit sharing.

Drawing on two waves of survey data collected from 250 Canadian firms in 2000 and 2004, this study examines union influence on the mix of compensation methods used by employers. As expected, firms with more unionization devoted a larger proportion of total compensation to indirect pay (also known as "employee benefits") than did firms with less unionization, a finding that held in both time periods. However, while more unionized firms devoted a smaller share of compensation to individual performance pay in 2000, this was not true in 2004. Also surprising, more unionized firms did not differ significantly from less unionized firms in their proportions of base pay, group performance pay, or organizational performance pay in either time period. The paper concludes that although unions may still have the power to influence some aspects of the wage bargain (i.e. the compensation mix), this power may be declining.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to knowledge of profit-sharing by utilizing a before-and-after analysis of panel data to assess whether the effects of profit-sharing adoption on productivity growth vary, depending on whether a profit-sharing adopter utilizes work teams or not, while controlling for numerous variables that may affect these results within a carefully constructed sample of Canadian establishments. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the moderating role of teamwork in the relationship between profit-sharing and productivity growth. Besides the implications for profit-sharing, ascertaining whether profit-sharing and work teams are complementary practices would have important implications for understanding how to develop more effective work teams, a topic of ongoing interest. We utilized a longitudinal research design to compare within-firm productivity growth during the three-year and five-year periods subsequent to profit-sharing adoption and within-firm productivity growth during the same periods in firms that had not adopted profit-sharing. Overall, our results suggest that use of team-based production plays an important moderating role in the success of employee profit-sharing—at least in terms of workplace productivity growth. Establishments that had adopted profit-sharing showed a substantial and highly significant increase in workplace productivity over both the three-year and five-year periods subsequent to adoption, but only if they had work teams. These findings are in line with the notion that work teams help to mitigate potential shirking behaviour in profit-sharing firms (Freeman, Kruse and Blasi, 2010) and are also in line with the argument that work teams serve as an effective mechanism to help translate the purported motivational and other benefits of profit-sharing into tangible productivity gains (Heywood and Jirjahn, 2009).

Symposium: La gestion des ressources humaines : du modèle traditionnel au modèle renouvelé, Gilles Guérin et Thierry Wils. Introduction : Michel Audet. Commentaires - Comments: Laurent Bélanger, Richard J. Long, Bernard Galambaud.