There’s nothing touchy and feely about employee relations. According to considerable business research, strong employee relations often lead to greater profitability and enhanced customer service.

Some business myths are as persistent as a strain of staph germs in a downtown hospital. For example, many business execs still believe that employee relations issues belong to Human Resources and is all about giving whiny employees hugs while listening to their petty complaints about bad parking spots and “he yelled at me’ rants.

Research, however, reveals that strong employee relations can be the competitive advantage that many companies sweat for to distinguish their product or service in an F5 tornado of consumer choices.

In fact, strong employee relations can mean improvement in discretionary effort–that is, employees’ willingness to exceed their formal responsibilities. That greater effort produces, on average, a 20% individual performance improvement, according to the Corporate Leadership Council (CLC), which surveyed more than 50,000 employees in more than 59 organizations worldwide.

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The CLC divides engagement into two flavors. Rational commitment results when a job serves employees’ financial, developmental, or professional self-interest. Emotional commitment, which has four times the power to affect performance as its more pragmatic counterpart, arises when workers value, enjoy, and believe in what they do.

About 11% of the workforce, called “true believers” by the CLC, demonstrate very high degrees of both commitment types; another 13% demonstrate depressingly little. Workers on the bad end of the bell curve are four times more likely to leave the organization or be discipline problems than average employees, says the report, which dubs this group “the disaffected.” The remaining 76% are moderates, who generally exhibit a strong commitment to one person or element of their jobs but can take or leave the rest. This group neither shirks nor strives; its intent to leave is variable.

Obviously, employers want to shift as many moderates as possible into the true-believer column. But first, companies must identify them, and that’s not easy. Observable performance factors are of little use in predicting an employee’s engagement level, the CLC found. Nor are demographics a good clue: Employees of three years are as likely to be committed as employees often years; salespeople as likely as administrators; entry-level as likely as executives; people in their twenties as likely as people in their fifties.

But if employee types tell you nothing, employers speak volumes. The differences among individual companies is enormous, with the percentage of committed, all-out-effort employees at the highest-scoring organizations nine times that of the lowest. And what distinguishes these high-engagement companies may not be what you think.

According to Deanna Riley Cain, who has worked as an Employee Relations Manager in the corporate world for more than 20 years, “Some organizations are enjoying up to 20% higher levels of employee performance, not because they pay more or provide better benefits, but because they let each employee know how important they are to the success of the business, give them lots of opportunities to contribute, and help them believe in the worth and credibility of the organization. “

“Employee relations,” says Riley Cain,” is not only crucial to building a high-performing workforce, it is also an essential defense against turnover, morale problems and discipline issues.”