Employee Salary Competitiveness and the Adoption of Employee Stock Ownership Plan
ZHANG Huili, ZHAO Jianyu, LU Zhengfei
Business School, Beijing Normal University; School of Accountancy, Central University of Finance and Economics; Guanghua School of Management, Peking University
Summary:
Rank-and-file employees are important to the development of firms, because their engagement determines how a firm's strategy is finally executed. The incentives of non-executive employees are a major concern in both academia and practice, as non-executive employees are recognized as essential motivators of the maximization of corporate value. Thus, aligning the interests of employees with shareholders and improving their relationships have become key areas of focus in China. In June 2014, the China Securities Regulatory Commission issued its “Guiding Opinions on the Pilot Program of Employee Stock Ownership Plans for Listed Companies,” which sets out policies for supporting the pilot implementation of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) for listed companies. ESOPs have since become increasingly popular. However, little evidence of firms' actual motivations for adopting ESOPs has been provided. Proposing the concept of ESOPs, Kelso and Adler (1958) argue that they can ease internal conflicts and align the interests of employees with those of shareholders, thus supporting the long-term interests of capitalism. According to social comparison theory, employee-shareholder conflict is often caused by salary competitiveness, in which employees compare their salaries with those of their counterparts outside the company. A lower level of salary competitiveness may be related to a more passive working attitude and a higher employee turnover rate, which can hinder the efficiency of a firm's productivity. Thus, is salary competitiveness a main concern in terms of employee stock ownership？ Addressing this question is important for regulators and can also enrich the ESOP-related literature. We investigate this question using a sample of Chinese listed A-shares firms from 2006 to 2017. We control for the effects of corporate finance and corporate governance characteristics. Following studies such as those of Bova et al. (2014, 2015), we include firms adopting employee stock ownership plans or stock options/restricted stocks for non-executive employees as our observations. We collect data from the China Stock Market & Accounting Research(CSMAR) and Wind Databases, exclude financial firms and missing values, and winsorize all the continuous data at the 1% and 99% levels. To calculate the salary competitiveness index, at least three observations are required in the same industry. Our empirical evidence indicates that the weaker a firm's level of employee salary competitiveness is, the more likely it will be that the firm adopts ESOPs. Our conclusions remain unchanged after conducting a series of robustness tests and considering any potential endogenous problems. We also find that the less competitive employee salary is, the more attention will be paid to maintaining the stability of the ESOPs, including demanding a longer locking period, covering more non-executive employees, and offering more shares to rank-and-file employees. We further document that the negative relation between employee salary competitiveness and the adoption of ESOPs is only significant in firms with more employee turnover pressure, higher human resource costs, and more severe financial constraints. In general, we find that adopting ESOPs is the most realistic choice for Chinese firms, as it makes up for less competitive salaries when facing the challenges of external labor mobility and internal human resource costs and capital constraints. This study makes several contributions. First, our research provides new insights into why ESOPs are adopted, from the perspective of employee salary competitiveness. Our results show that firms use ESOPs to make up for less competitive employee salaries, and thus support regulators' original aims of promoting ESOPs. Second, our empirical evidence can bring some enlightment to the relevant regulatory authorities about improving the design of ESOPs to help protect employee interests. Our conclusions also provide regulators with methods of optimizing the ESOP policy environment and can help firms to create harmonious environments for their internal employees. Third, we enrich the literature related to ESOPs, employee salaries, and income distribution.
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