Job Performance and the Employment Relationship

Full course description

To improve the performance of a firm, managers have to find tools to hire the right people, to sort them into the right job, to motivate them to do their work well, to develop their skills through formal and informal learning and to cooperate efficiently with co-workers. Firms that stimulate one aspect might do so at the cost of others. Managers therefore face many complex trade-offs in their personnel policies.
In this course economic tools to understand these trade-offs will be discussed and illustrated with examples how to apply them in practice.
Many questions are asked about the employment relationship, such as: Why should pay vary across workers within firms – and how "compressed" should pay be within firms? Should firms pay workers for their performance on the job or for their skills or hours of work? How are pay and promotions structured across jobs to induce optimal effort from employees? How to design jobs and performance measures? Why use teams and how are teams used most effectively? How should all these human resource management practices, from incentive pay to teamwork, be combined within firms?