TY - JOUR AU - Bartel,Ann AU - Freeman,Richard AU - Ichniowski,Casey AU - Kleiner,Morris M. TI - Can a Work Organization Have an Attitude Problem? The Impact of Workplaces on Employee Attitudes and Economic Outcomes JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 9987 PY - 2003 Y2 - September 2003 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9987 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9987.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Ann P. Bartel Graduate School of Business Columbia University 3022 Broadway, 623 Uris Hall New York, NY 10027 Tel: 212/854-4419 Fax: (212) 316-9219 E-Mail: apb2@columbia.edu Richard B. Freeman NBER 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/868-3900 Fax: 617/868-2742 E-Mail: freeman@nber.org Casey Ichniowski Graduate School of Business 3022 Broadway Street, 713 Uris Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027 Tel: 212/854-4433 Fax: 212/316-9355 E-Mail: bei1@columbia.edu Morris M. Kleiner University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs 260 Humphrey Center 301 19th Street South Minneapolis, MN 55455 Tel: 612/625-2089 Fax: 612/625-6351 E-Mail: kleiner@umn.edu AB - Using the employee opinion survey responses from several thousand employees working in 193 branches of a major U.S. bank, we consider whether there is a distinctive workplace component to employee attitudes despite the common set of corporate human resource management practices that cover all the branches. Several different empirical tests consistently point to the existence of a systematic branch-specific component to employee attitudes. “Branch effects” can also explain why a significant positive cross-sectional correlation between branch-level employee attitudes and branch sales performance is not observed in longitudinal fixed-effects sales models. The results of our empirical tests concerning the determinants of employee attitudes and the determinants of branch sales are consistent with an interpretation that workplace-specific factors lead to better outcomes for both employees and the bank, and that these factors are more likely to be some aspect of the branches’ internal operations rather than some characteristic of the external market of the branch. ER -