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  Professor Charlie Trevor Associate Professor - Management and Human Resources Degree PhD, Cornell University (industrial and labor relations) MLIR, Michigan State University (labor and industrial relations) MA, Michigan State University (exercise science) BA, Valparaiso University (math, psychology) Contact Information: Charlie Trevor 4113 Grainger Hall 975 University Avenue Madison, WI 53706 ctrevor@bus.wisc.edu (608) 262-7920

  Biography

  Charlie O. Trevor is an Associate Professor and the Keller Fellow in the Department of Management and Human Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Earlier, he was a faculty

  member in the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University in 1998. He teaches courses on

  employee compensation, research methods, and HR systems. His research focuses on (1) the determinants and consequences of employee compensation, and (2) employee turnover,

  particularly of the employees that companies can least afford to lose. His research has primarily been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology,

  and Personnel Psychology.

  My Vita
  

  • Current/Recent Research Projects

    In a study to be published in the Academy of Management Journal (April, 2008), Anthony Nyberg and I examined the impact of downsizing on voluntary turnover.  Further, we looked at sets of HR practices that might serve to buffer the organization from such an effect by better instilling feelings of attachment or fairness among employees.  Additionally, we assess how career development policies, perhaps ironically, may actually contribute to greater turnover in a downsizing context, as the organization arguably has both made employees more marketable and given them reason to consider leaving.  The study is not an indictment of downsizing, but rather is an attempt to explore whether there are turnover effects that decision-makers should be aware of.  Moreover, by identifying HR practices that can help to mitigate downsizing effects on turnover, we may be able to provide companies with potential avenues for dealing with the matter (whether such avenues are worth the investment is another question).  This study will also be briefly summarized by Harvard Business Review (May, 2008).  Anthony, my co-author on this, is a doctoral student who is finishing up here at Wisconsin and will begin work at South Carolina this Fall.

    In a second recently accepted paper that is in press at the Academy of Management Journal, Barry Gerhart and I collaborated with a former doctoral student, Tae Heon Lee, and a visiting scholar from Germany, Ingo Weller.  In this study we used a large nationally representative sample to shed some light on why, after thousands of studies, we still cannot explain a great deal of the variation in voluntary turnover behavior.  As such, we argue for a change in how turnover is studied.  One aspect of this change is to recognize and demonstrate how the field will advance by taking a more nuanced view of the effects of job satisfaction, the single most studied precursor of voluntary turnover.  A second aspect involves a shift in how we conceive of the ease with which employees can move in the job market.  While most research has measured ease of movement with employee perceptions or unemployment rates, we argue that unsolicited job offers, from both conceptual and measurement perspectives, offers a cleaner indicator of ease of movement.  Indeed, consistent with notions such as the “War for Talent” and “employee raiding,” we find that 23% of turnover in our sample occurred in response to such offers.

    I am also working on two studies of employees in the service industry, both of which are co-authored by John Hausknecht, a faculty member at Cornell University.  In one, we find that higher levels of work unit turnover rates (both voluntary and involuntary) predict lower levels of customer satisfaction.  This effect was more pronounced in larger units and when employees reported lower levels of group cohesion.  The implication is that the extent to which turnover disrupts operations and prevents establishing employee-customer relationships is reduced when work units are relatively small and when employees in the unit share commitment to the task and to each other.  Of additional interest in this paper is the discussion of whether involuntary turnover rates tell us about leaving effects per se, or rather are primarily proxies for workforce quality, which then affects outcomes of interest in avenues outside of leaving behavior. In another study with John, we focus on identifying factors that differentiate high and low performer turnover behavior.  Such differentiation can shed light on how best to retain the high performers and high potential individuals that are of most value to the organization.  This paper builds on a study that Barry Gerhart and I published several years ago, where we showed that the turnover behavior of top performers, relative to that of less accomplished employees, was more sensitive to the degree that pay was linked to performance.  We also follow the leavers to new jobs and assess old-job performance effects on how well leavers fare in the labor market. 

    Finally, I am working with data from elementary and secondary school teachers to examine how accepting they would be of pay practices that deviate from the traditional salary schedule, in which teacher pay is simply a function of years of service and post-undergraduate education.  As the push for pay-for-performance for teachers continues to gain momentum, it is important to determine what specific aspects of pay-for-performance will be more and less acceptable to teachers (e.g., merit pay, skill-based pay, school-wide bonuses, test scores as criteria for pay allocation, etc.).  Additionally, I will also look at what teacher characteristics drive these reactions, as it may be that certain subsets (e.g., new teachers, from whom we can better infer what affects attraction and early career retention) may view pay-for-performance differently and may suggest different implications from a policy perspective.

     

  • Publications

    Trevor, C.O., Gerhart, B., & Reilly, G., (in press). Reconsidering pay dispersion’s effect on the performance of interdependent work: Reconciling sorting and pay inequality. Academy of Management Journal.

    Hausknecht, J.P. & Trevor, C.O. 2011. Collective turnover at the group, unit, and organizational levels: Evidence, issues, and implications. Journal of Management, 37(1), 352-388.

    Trevor, C.O., & Nyberg, A. 2008. Downsizing Effects on Voluntary Turnover Rates: Human Resource Practices as Potential Moderators. Academy of Management Journal. (pre-publication version)

    Lee, T., Gerhart, B., Weller, I, & Trevor, C.O. 2008. Distinct Voluntary Turnover Paths and Determinants: A Competing Risks Approach. Academy of Management Journal. (pre-publication version)

    Trevor, C.O., & Wazeter, D.L. 2006. A contingent view of reactions to objective pay conditions: Interdependence among pay structure characteristics and internal and external referents. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 1260-1275. (PDF)

    Sturman, M.C., Trevor, C.O., Boudreau, J., & Gerhart, B. 2003. Is it worth it to win the talent war? Using turnover research to evaluate the utility of performance-based pay. Personnel Psychology, 56, 997-1035.

    Hausknecht, J., Trevor, C.O., & Farr, J.L. 2002. Retaking Ability Tests in a Selection Setting: Implications for Practice Effects, Training Performance, and Turnover. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 243-254. (PDF)

    Trevor, C.O. 2001. Interactions among actual ease of movement determinants and job satisfaction in the prediction of voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44, 621-638. (PDF)

    Sturman, M.C., & Trevor, C.O. 2001. The implications of linking the dynamic performance and turnover literatures. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 684-696. (PDF)

    Welbourne, T.M., & Trevor, C.O. 2000. The roles of departmental and position power in job evaluation. Academy of Management Journal, 43, 761-771. (PDF)

    Graham, M., & Trevor, C.O. 2000. Managing new pay program introductions to enhance the competitiveness of multinational corporations. Competitiveness Review, 10, 136-154. (PDF)

    Trevor, C.O., & Graham, M. 2000. Deriving the market wage: Three decision areas in the compensation survey process. World at Work Journal, 9(4), 69-76.

    Trevor, C.O., Gerhart, B., & Boudreau, J.W. 1997. Voluntary turnover and job performance: Curvilinearity and the moderating effects of salary growth and promotions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82, 44-61. (PDF)

    Gerhart, B., & Trevor, C.O. 1996. Employment variability under different managerial compensation systems. Academy of Management Journal, 39, 1692-1712. January, 2008. (PDF)

    Gerhart, B., Trevor, C.O., & Graham, M.E. 1996. New directions in compensation research: Synergies, risk, and survival. In G.R. Ferris (Ed.) Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, (Vol. 14, pp. 143-203).

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    Working Papers

    Hausknecht, J.P., Trevor, C.O., & Howard, M.J. Unit-Level Turnover Rates and Customer Service Quality: Implications of Voluntariness, Group Cohesion, and Unit Size. 

    Trevor, C.O., Hausknecht, J.P., & Howard, M.J. Why The Best and Worst Leave and What They Find Elsewhere: Job Performance Effects on Employment Transitions. 

    Trevor, C.O. What Do Teachers Want: Teacher Preferences for Alternative Pay Systems. 

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