Study: Retailers should pay more for top-notch workers

Innovations Report: As resources become tighter, managers in the retail service sector are searching for ways to be more efficient and one place they should look is their hiring practices, says a University of South Carolina industrial-organizational psychologist.

Rob Ployhart, an associate professor of management in USC's Moore School of Business, and his colleagues, Jeff Weekley of Kenexa and Jase Ramsey at USC, have completed a study providing hard evidence that hiring better people contributes to better store effectiveness in terms of sales figures.

"Intuitively, every hiring manager knows that employing better employees is going to lead to better results," Ployhart said. "The reality, though, is that many retailers maintain a certain amount of skepticism about the value of investing in frontline service employees."

Click to continue