This dissertation examines the likelihood of worker-firm separations in the context of Great Britain and Greece by using high quality databases upon the personnel records from two firms in the banking industry, one British and one Greek. Duration models are estimated to examine employee turnover in relation to a number of predictor variables, well established in the literature, at a comparative level between the national settings. The available data for the British bank cover the period of 1989-2001, while comparative data are available for the Greek organisation over the same period. These longitudinal data provide information relevant to each firm 's workforce in accordance to demographics, and workers' occupational, organisational and external environment characteristics. The analysis of the data is unde11aken through both the formulation of parametric Weibull) and non-parametric (Cox) duration (survival) models, exploring the effect of particular determinants on employee turnover over time. I also estimate competing risk models identifying the different outcomes of/reasons for worker-firm separations over time. The analysis also captures the effect of unobserved heterogeneity across workers as approached by the Heckman-Singer model. A focal point of the study is the findings on workers' performance and turnover indicating that it is sustained, rather than instantaneous, performance that is linked to separations. In common with some earlier studies, I found qualified support for a u-shaped relationship between performance and separations, but only in the case of the British data. I provide further evidence of the well documented suggestion in the literature towards the negative effect of age to turnover behaviour. Both of the banks under investigation experienced substantial reorganisation activity over the time period considered, and I found that the year following this was characterised by increased separation propensities. While some findings are consistent across the firms in the two countries studied, I found that single men are more likely than their female counterparts to quit in the bank based in Britain, but less likely to quit in that based in Greece. Although age appeared to be also related non-linearly to turnover, the propensities of British workers to be separated from the bank start to increase at an earlier point than their Greek counterparts. My suggestions on why incompatible evidence is derived across the datasets were based on withstanding differences in culture, institutional arrangements and labour market characteristics between the countries.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:618298 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Maltezou, Vivi |
| Publisher | Lancaster University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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