The impact of company human resource policies on social skills: Implications for training sponsorship, quit rates and efficiency wages

The concept of a firm's human capital is reconsidered to include both the t echnical and the social skills of its workforce. Technical skills are defin ed by the ability to turn inputs into outputs, and measured by the producti vity of unit labour effort. Social skills are defined by the propensity to behave in a manner conducive to the film's objectives. In other words, soci al skills are constituted as the norm of effort contribution to which an in dividual assents, and are measured by observed motivation and behaviour. Th e existence for fir ms of a labour management function is proposed and supp orted, relating social skills to human resource policies. implications for the labour market are that: (i) firm pay for general training and, at the s ame time, wages do not necessarily increase with training; (ii) human capit al acquisition may not lead to an increase in quitting, even controlling fo r wages; (iii) human resource policies substitute for efficiency wages ol f or employee monitoring; and (iv) economies with high organisational commitm ent have low equilibrium unemployment rates.