Citazione:
In modern economies firm innovation and workers’ knowledge are inextricably
linked. Employee competencies and knowledge are a crucial asset of innovative
firms: tacit organizational competence improves productivity and performance
through selecting and allocating competent people whereas lack of skills and
training can act as a constraint.
A firm which fails to develop skills risks the inability to have a good implementation
of the new technologies and to diffuse innovation in the whole firm,
preventing workers from understanding and producing innovative products and
process. Training leads instead to an increase in the quality of labour by equipping
employees with greater skills and knowledge. This makes the practices,
implicit or explicit, used by a firm to acquire new knowledge, and to rearrange
and diffuse existing knowledge within the firm (human management practices)
an important strategic relevant resource as well.
The aim of this study was to test in which way flexible labour arrangements
influence - by affecting the long-term relationship between firm and worker -
the firm capacity to innovate. Since there could be valuable differences, both in
terms of costs and worker attitude towards the firm, we distinguish two different
kinds of flexibility: internal and external. Internal flexibility does not necessarily
yield wage cost saving and, on the contrary, could even lead to a significant
increase. From this perspective, part-time work can be used to accommodate
working hour preferences and enhance loyalty, as well as for training or educational
breaks. External flexibility aims instead at the quantitative adaptation
of labour to the requirements of the firms by easy hiring or dismissal, as well as
by means of temporary contracts, leading to higher turnover of the personnel
and to (possibly) low-trust labour relations.
In particular, we believe that the new labour arrangements, introduced in
the nineties in the Italian system of labour law, could have strongly influenced
the capacity of the Italian firms to innovate. Such reforms were asymmetric
and introduced a two-tier system, since the use of fixed-term contracts left
the legislation applying to the stock of workers largely untouched and changed
regulations only for a subset of workers. These flexible arrangements could
have simply induced change in the composition of the workforce, the entry of
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low skilled workers and/or workers with low educational attainments.
Our econometric analysis seems to support this view. Results on internal
flexibility are clear and indicate that higher percentage of part-time workers are
associated with a better capacity to innovate. This effect is stronger for firms in
high-tech sectors. On the other hand, results on external flexibility are rather
mixed. Especially for firms in high-tech sectors, a higher turnover negatively
affects both the probability of introducing product or process innovation and
the percentage of new products in total sales. However, there are labour arrangements
(as workers coming from man power agencies and with temporary
contracts) that positively affect the degree of firm innovativeness, even though
only for firms in low-tech sectors. Instead, for firms in high-tech sectors, a higher
degree of external flexibility negatively affects firm capacity to innovate. In any
case, these results suggest that there is an optimum of flexibility, beyond which
firm labour flexibility can negatively affect the capacity of a firm to innovative
and, hence, to survive and develop.
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