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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new data source available for researchers with interest in human resources management (HRM) and personnel economics, the Linked Personnel Panel (LPP).

The LPP is a longitudinal and representative employer-employee data set covering establishments in Germany and a subset of their workforce and is designed for quantitative empirical human resource research.

The LPP employee survey applies a number of established scales to measure job characteristics and job perceptions, personal characteristics, employee attitudes towards the organization and employee behaviour. This paper gives an overview of both the employer and employee survey and outlines the definitions, origins, and statistical properties of the scales used in the individual questionnaire.

The paper describes how researchers can access the data.

First, the data set combines employer and employee surveys that can be matched to each other. Second, it can also be linked to a number of additional administrative data sets. Third, the LPP covers a wide range of firms and workers from different backgrounds. Finally, because of its longitudinal dimension, the LPP should facilitate the study of causal effects of HRM practices.

Contemporary primary school populations in the Netherlands represent a wealth of languages, ethnicities, and cultures. In 1999, 14.7% of the total population of 1.54 million pupils were registered as minority pupils (Statistics Netherlands, 2001). Most of these are of Turkish (23.7%) and Moroccan (20.4%) origin, speaking Turkish, Arabic, and/or Berber at home apart from or instead of Dutch (Extra et al., 2001). As in many other Western European countries, a significant difference can be observed between the school achievements of pupils belonging to a cultural-linguistic minority and the pupils belonging to the majority group (Walraven & Broekhof, 1998). Turkish and Moroccan pupils, for instance, lag behind a bit less than half a learning year in arithmetic and more than two learning years in Dutch language proficiency by the end of primary school (Tesser & Iedema, 2001). Besides sociolinguistic background, socio-economic, cultural, and school factors account for the underachievement of language minority pupils.

Prominent corporate scandals involving companies like Wirecard, Enron, VW and Tyco underscore the corrupting influence of power, with leaders often engaging in antisocial behaviors. Provoked by this, this study investigates the relationship between supervisory responsibility and one specific dimension of altruistic behavior. Understanding the dynamics of how structural power, particularly supervisory responsibility, associates with altruistic behavior is essential for organizations, given the well-documented advantages of altruistic leaders in terms of performance, innovation or ethical leadership.

Drawing upon the approach-inhibition theory of power, this article proposes that individuals with greater structural power in terms of prolonged duration and greater scope of supervisory responsibility will show diminished altruistic behavior. Following theoretical considerations, power influences leaders’ behavior by decreasing attentiveness, reducing empathy and increasing self-focus. The study uses recent German linked employer-employee data to test the relationship between supervisory responsibility and one specific dimension of leader altruistic behavior (n = 2,752).

The results support that a prolonged duration and a greater scope of supervisory responsibility correlate negatively with the dimension of leader altruistic behavior under study.

The research empirically validates the findings on behavioral consequences of structural power from experimental settings for organizational leaders by explicitly focusing on the duration and the scope of supervisory responsibility. The findings provide useful insights for organizations concerning leader selection and leader governance mechanisms.