In digital competitive environments, organizations’ ability to innovate is more than ever the key to competitive advantage. One way to cope with this increased pressure for innovation is to capitalize on employees’ ability to generate new ideas and use these as building blocks for new and better products, services, and work processes. Individual innovation thus emerges as a key competence required from workers, in turn crucially affecting the way managers make employees contribute to organizational goals and assess their performance. This study draws on the process-based approach to HRM ( Bowen and Ostroff, 2004 ) suggesting that HRM practices may have a signaling effect, to address the following research question: which specific characteristics of performance appraisal are more likely to be perceived as promoting individual innovation at work? To address this issue, we carried out a survey on 865 employees working in large, multinational firms operating in digitalized sectors or industries with the potential to become digitalized. We collected data on the main characteristics of the performance appraisal systems adopted by the firm where respondents work, as perceived by employees themselves. We gathered also data on the respondents’ overall perception that performance appraisal boosts innovative work behavior (IWB). Then, we employed logit analysis to test the relationship between data on performance appraisal systems and data on the effectiveness of performance appraisal as a booster of IWB. Our results reveal that, as compared to informal feedback, formal performance appraisal is more likely to reduce the perception that performance appraisal promotes individual innovation and creativity at work. In addition, we found that in the employees’ perception performance appraisal focused on the achievement of pre-set, quantitative outcomes is more likely to affect positively IWB than appraisal focused on pre-defined skills that employees exhibited performing their work. However, performance assessment focused on the new competences developed by the employees has a perceived positive impact even stronger than result-oriented appraisal. Taken together, these results contribute to advance our understanding of how organizations should evaluate employees in the digitalization era.

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Social policies aim to alleviate poverty and income inequality, providing cash benefits and services to households facing economic difficulties. Nonetheless, it is well known that a relevant portion of eligible households do not claim such policies. Through an original methodology based on ISEE (Indicatore della Situazione Economica Equivalente) administrative records, this paper offers initial empirical evidence on the non-take-up of social policies in Italy. We show that roughly 1.1 million of poor households did not file the ISEE declaration in 2018, a necessary step to claim most means-tested cash benefits and services. Based on Logit regressions, results show that younger and larger households are more inclined to claim social policies. In contrast, households headed by a female or migrant tend to report severe levels of non-take-up, as do those living in the islands.

Over the last two decades, interest in understanding what determines the redistributive role of tax-benefit systems has burgeoned worldwide. In the case of Italy, previous analyses tended to focus on quantifying the contribution of marginal tax rates, deductions and tax credits to the redistributive capacity of the personal income tax (PIT), while neglecting the effect of proportional taxes, social insurance contributions (SICs) and tax-free cash benefits on income redistribution. This paper aims to address this gap by applying Gini-based decomposition methodologies (Onrubia et al., 2014; Urban, 2014) to the vertical and horizontal effects of the Italian tax-benefit system for the 2018 year at the national level and the macroregional level. The findings show that tax-benefit instruments different from progressive taxation can contribute up to more than 50% of the redistributive effect with marked spatial differences regarding social transfers and SICs.