Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to analyze three different forms of benefit systems and the effects of their application on Spanish firms' attraction and retention capacity, differentiating these systems depending on the flexibility offered to the workers.Design/methodology/approach– The data of this study have been collected from a sample of 308 human resources managers in Spanish firms, through an online questionnaire. The hypotheses were tested by ordinary least squares regression analyses.Findings– The results show that firms having more flexible compensation systems, that is, those providing greater freedom to workers in the election of their benefits and the design of the benefit system, reported to have a higher attraction and retention capacity than firms offering to their employees a unique and similar benefit package for all the employees.Research limitations/implications– Future studies could extent this study by analyzing different contexts in order to determine whether some institutional factors can influence these results. Similarly, it would be interesting to analyze the effects of these systems on other organizational outcomes, such as their financial performance.Practical implications– Human resources policies and, especially, compensation policies have a significant influence on the ability of firms to recruit and retain core employees, necessary for corporate success. This study sheds light on the effectiveness of different benefits systems in enhancing the firms' capacities to attract and retain core employees. Taking into account the hard financial and labor environment that the Spanish firms have to face, the results of this study can have important implications for managers.Originality/value– This paper responds to recent calls asking for the necessity of analyzing the effect of different benefit systems in contexts different to the broadly considered American context. Similarly, these results could be applied to other countries with conditions similar to Spain, that is, countries where the benefit systems have been traditionally less flexible and with an offer of benefits quite different than firms located in countries where the State offers a less-social assistance to citizens.
Many tourism agglomerations are situated near natural resources, which implies a need to balance business growth with environmental preservation. Our analysis of the location decisions of 295 luxury beach hotels in Spain between 1960 and 2015 reveals two main findings. First, we confirm the positive relationship between the existence of demand-related urbanization services around natural resources and the attractiveness of agglomerations to new entrants. Second, we find that an agglomeration's attractiveness negatively affects the density of firms in the agglomeration if that attractiveness hinders firms' access to the same natural resources. Our results contribute to the strategy literature on agglomerations and provide a better understanding of how the tourism industry can work toward achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs). JEL CLASSIFICATION: L83, M13, M14, Q50, Q26, R30
Many firms offer employees a broad range of benefits as part of their compensation. However, little attention has been given to the extent to which firms communicate with their employees in relation to such benefits. This study proposes that benefit communication can have both direct and indirect positive effects on employees' benefit level satisfaction. The effects of benefit communication were examined by means of a survey among 828 employees of different Spanish firms. This study hypothesized and found that benefit communication led to increased benefit level satisfaction. Similarly, this study found that benefit communication can influence benefit level satisfaction through the multiple intermediating effects of employees' perceived organizational support and employees' comparison of their benefits with those of referent others. These results imply that academics and practitioners must pay attention to providing adequate benefit communication in order to ensure the effectiveness of benefits.