The exact question is: ‘What are the main methods by w hich [em ployees in the largest occupational group] are made aware o f their job responsibilities?’.

an impact on changes in workplace effort. Only using competency standards and using individual objectives work for both employee effort and changes in workplace effort. Supervision has an impact at the individual level but not at workplace level, and at individual level it is only effective for non professionals in the private sector, increasing the likelihood of employee reporting that their jobs require them to work hard, but with small size effects. Team objectives, standard operational procedures and job descriptions (the latter only in the public sector for non professional employees)

only have an impact on changes in workplace effort, but not on employee effort.

Moving away from the overview of Table 4.6 and towards the specific regression in the private sector, on professionals, the only practice that has an impact on individual effort is competency standards, increasing the likelihood of employees reporting that their jobs make them work hard by 5 pp. With regard to workplace effort, using competency standards is marginally significant and has a positive but a lower size impact of 3.1 pp. In the category of non-professionals in the private sector, using supervision and individual objectives are both marginally significant for employee effort with a positive coefficient size around 3 pp. For workplace effort, standard operational procedures are also marginally significant, but with a negative coefficient size - however the size if under 1 pp.

In the public sector and with regard to professionals, workplace effort seems to be slightly hampered when standard operational procedures are in place, with a 2.1 pp higher likelihood of managers to declare that workplace effort has decreased. Non-professionals in the public sector are mainly responsive to competency standards,

descriptions are significant and positive, while individual objectives is only marginally significant and negative, but both have very low impact sizes (under 1 pp).

To summarise by sector the results from Table 4.6, it can be noticed that the highest impact on effort in the private and the public sectors comes from competency standards. The coefficient sizes are positive and are the highest in Table 4.6, yet they are not very large, at only 5 or 6 pp. In both sectors, standard operational procedures may have some negative influences on workplace effort (2.1 pp in the public sector for professionals). Summarising the results by respondent across sectors, it can be noticed that individual effort increases if supervision, individual objectives and competency standards are used; and that workplace effort increases if team objectives, competency standards and job descriptions are used, but the impact of all these practices is rather small. It may be that, whilst practices of work supervision do seem to have an impact on work effort and the findings allow this study not to reject

Hypothesis 1, they are not necessarily the best and most effective tool to encourage increases in employee effort or workplace effort.

Turning next to Table 4.7, it includes a set of 6 HRM practices encoded from answers provided by managers to the question: ‘How do you monitor the quality of the work undertaken at this workplace?’. The six possible answers are: (1) customer surveys; (2) external audits; (3) individual employees; (4) inspectors; (5) manager / supervisor; and (6) records on faults / complaints. All but the latter have some positive effect on individual effort, the highest impact being from external auditors for professionals in the private sector (7.6 pp), but the lowest effect also being associated with this practice (in the public sector for professional workers: decreases of 6 pp). For

workplace effort, two practices are insignificant: using records of faults / complaints, and using individual employees to monitor quality of work. The reason why using records o f faults / complaints appears to be insignificant across all regressions presented in Table 4.7 may be that a focus on avoiding the failures does not work - instead, the five other practices which are not necessarily focused on keeping track o f failure, seem to work better.

It becomes apparent in the first instance when regressions are run on the whole sample (i.e. with the data not split) that customer surveys and inspectors are associated across both employee and workplace measures of effort with increases in effort. The largest impact is a highly significant 7.6 pp increase in workplace effort in the case of using customer surveys, followed by a marginally significant increase of 4.4 pp in the case of using inspectors to monitor the quality of work.

More effects appear when the sample is split by sector. Starting in the private sector, professionals’ effort is almost equally responsive to monitoring via customer surveys and managers / supervisors (increases of 4 to 5 pp for individual effort). The highest increase in Table 4.7 for individual effort comes from using external auditors, at 7.6 pp. For their non-professional counterparts, individual effort is responsive to monitoring via individual employees and inspectors, both with coefficient sizes of around 2 pp, whereas workplace effort is responsive to using customer surveys (7 pp) but significantly negatively affected by the use of external auditors (a decrease of up to 14 pp for workplace effort). The latter effect may be explained by the fact that the external auditing process could be perceived as slowing

documentation required, as well as having the effect of changing the behaviour of employees towards the externally imposed objectives.

In the public sector, professionals appear to deploy high levels o f workplace effort if the manager or supervisor are used to monitor quality, but this increase of 17 pp is only associated with workplace effort going up “a little”, whereas workplace effort has a negative likelihood of 2.2 pp to be going up “a lot”, and a 8 pp likelihood to stay the same or decrease. Where external auditors are used, there is a marginally significant negative impact on individual effort o f 6 pp.61

Similarly to private sector non-professionals, non-professionals in the public sector workplaces are more likely to see their effort improving “a lot” if customer surveys are used (14 pp). They dislike the practice o f monitoring quality via supervisor of manager, which is significant but only increases the likelihood of the workplace seeing “effort going up a little” (by 12 pp) whereas it decreases the likelihood that effort goes up a lot by 2.1 pp. It may be that the assessment of quality by manager or supervisor leaves the door open to subjective or inconsequential evaluations of quality, leading to decreases in effort, whereas the use of customer surveys appears to be overall the best solution to monitoring quality in such a way as to solicit more effort. Individual employees are more likely to report that their jobs require them to work hard if inspectors are used to monitor the quality of work.

61 For an exam ple with regard to the influence o f external auditors, in response to universities being