기간제 근로자와 경영성과에 관한 연구

After the foreign currency crisis in 1997 the number of nonstandard workers rapidly increased in Korea. Companies argued that the use of nonstandard workers was unavoidable in order to improve employment flexibility and reduce labor costs, necessary competitive measures in a borderless global market. The use of nonstandard workers has since become a critical social issue in Korea,resulting in high job insecurity, low wages, and next-to-nothing benefits. While the use of nonstandard workers clearly has a social cost, market-oriented theories including transaction cost theory, resource based theory, and real option theory support the use of nonstandard workers as an efficient way for improving firm performance. In other words, companies use nonstandard workers to improve financial performance with employment flexibility. This study analyzes data from three years of the Korean Workplace Panel Survey (WPS) conducted by Korea Labor Institute (2005, 2007,and 2009) in order to establish the relationship between use of nonstandard workers – specifically fixed-term employment workers of one year or less – and qualitative and quantitative measures of financial performance among Korean firms. Among nonstandard workers, fixed-term employment workers are the key point of this paper. fixed-term employment worker is defined as a worker with fixed employment contract of at most one year. The contract can be renewed only once as a fixed-term employment worker for the maximum of two years by the law. In practice, many contract workers should leave the companies because newly coming workers replace incumbent workers. Companies are reluctant to keep incumbent workers because they worry losing employment flexibility with higher labor cost. Earlier studies on nonstandard workers in Korea were focused on the attitude difference between regular and nonstandard workers. Then the focus was moved to the wage and other HRM related issues and then finally moved to the factors determining the use of nonstandard workers. Labor cost saving, union avoidance, and labor flexibility improvement are listed as major factors using nonstandard workers. Past research regarding the effect of using nonstandard workers on financial performance has been inconclusive. In Korea, one study determined that using nonstandard workers reduced a firm’s operating profit ratio, while another study showed that temporary employment and fixed-term employment workers improve financial performance. The latter study pointed out that temporary employment is effective way to maintain workers with updated skills only under rapidly changing environments, conditions different from the situation of typical nonstandard workers in Korea. And empirical results of a variety of studies support the timely use of temporary workers to improve financial performance by avoiding overuse of labor especially for specific, simple jobs. The other study shows using nonstandard workers in 14 European Union countries, only work-away-fromthe-office type of four flexible work types improves profitability and service quality and productivity. However, using European countries data, are search argues that externalization of labor including flexibility and outsourcing is not use ful for improving firm performance. Another recent study using Spain manufacturing companies shows the use of temporary workers lowers labor productivity but do not improve the return of sales at all. From HRM perspective, nonstandard workers are not motivated to work harder because of low possibility for contract renewal. But there are many types of nonstandard workers including fixed-term employment workers, part-time workers, dispatched workers, outsourcing, and independent contract workers, Another point is voluntariness for nonstandard work. This characteristic is used to explain inconsistent empirical results on the effect of nonstandard workers on financial performance. This paper measured the result of using fixed-term employment workers on the financial performance of hundreds of Korean firms using three years of WPS data: 2005 (987 firms), 2007 (817 firms),and 2009 (769 firms). The analysis evaluated fixed-term employment workers according to the ratio of fixed-term employment workers to all workers, as well as according to the number of a pre-determined HRM programs the firms operated for fixed-term employment workers. Industry,number of workers, year of workplace establishment, and union existence were included as control variables. Workplace business strategy was also included as a control for the business environment. Both quantitative and qualitative measures were used to establish financial performance. Qualitative measures were reported using a 4-point Likert scale compared to a same industry average, and included per capita labor cost, average overtime hours per week, quit ratio, sales per capita, and return of sales per capita. relative financial performance, relative labor productivity, product quality,innovation led by workers, quit rate, product / service innovation level, and general industrial relation climate were used. Regarding quantitative measures, the ratio of fixed-term employment workers to all workers was strongly related to the quit ratio but not any other performance measure. The presence of HRM programs for fixed-term employment workers reduced overtime, but not other performance measures. Regarding qualitative measures, the effect of using fixed-term employment workers was not significantly associated with financial performance or labor productivity. However, firm size is an important variable: it reduced worker-led innovation and increased the quit rate. The presence of HRM programs for fixed-term employment workers shows many positive effects on workplace performance, including increased worker-led innovation, and improved industrial relations climate. The results of this study may add another inconsistent empirical result to the effect of fixed-term employment workers on firm performance in Korea. However, the empirical results show negative effect of using fixed-term employment workers without strong positive effect on financial performance. The results suggest companies should use a considered approach to the use of fixed-term employment workers, because their use may bring negative firm effects without any positive effect on financial performance.