Using data collected from 1,987 employees at several locations of a large firm, this study investigates relationships between these employees' cognitive and attitudinal perceptions of an employee assistance program (EAP) and their propensity to use it. Familiarity with the program, perceived accessibility of it, and perceived managerial support for it are hypothesized to affect both employees' confidence in the program and their propensity to use it, and confidence in the EAP is further hypothesized to affect propensity to use. LISREL analysis supported the overall model, but the direct paths from the cognitive variables to propensity to use were not supported and confidence in the program was therefore indicated to be an essential mediating variable. Propensity to use an EAP is argued to be an important indicator of effective EAP implementation and suggestions are offered to management for promoting employee confidence in an EAP and ultimately their propensity to use it.

Working from an institutional perspective, this study tested hypotheses about the relationships between workplace characteristics and health care cost containment practices. The analyses show that urban location of the workplace, number of employees, and education level of the workforce are related to three different cost containment strategies: the management of utilization with traditional indemnity insurance plans; offering of alternative health insurance plans (HMOs); and employee development relative to health care consumption. Workplaces with greater proportions of black or female employees were less likely and those with older workers were more likely to engage in employee development practices. The race, gender, and age variables were not significantly related to the other strategies. Unionization was not significantly related to any of the three strategies in the multivariate model. These findings are proposed to have implications for human resource management, as well as for health care policy and reform esforts.

Working within an integrative framework of human resource management (HRM) in context (Jackson & Schuler, 1995), and theorizing from an integrated institutional and resource dependence perspective (Oliver, 1991), this study investigated whether factors in the internal and external organizational environments are associated with the presence of a counseling/rehabilitative response by employers to identified employee substance abuse. Data were collected at two points in time from a sample of 342 private sector worksites in the state of Georgia. The results of ordered logistic regression analysis suggest that variables from both the internal and external organizational environments are related to a rehabilitative response by management to employee substance abuse.

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