Search results

The purpose of this paper is to use a sample of UK entrepreneurial initial public offering (IPO) companies to investigate whether they change their compensation strategies as they undertake the crucial transformation of the business from private to public status.

The paper uses the agency perspective to underpin an examination of the changes within the compensation packages of companies at the stage of the initial public offering, particularly with regard to the use of executive director incentive schemes, and compares this to “best practice” guidelines issued within the UK.

The paper discovers that even though incentive schemes are adopted, the majority are unconditional and requiring only an improvement in share price and the executive to remain employed in order for gains to be made. The general finding is that before IPO most companies did not have an incentive pay scheme in place, and those that did, operated unconditional option schemes. However, after IPO most companies introduced an incentive pay scheme, but the majority were unconditional rather than conditional (i.e. schemes requiring executives to meet pre‐determined performance criteria – as recommended by “best practice” guidelines).

The paper exposes that, contrary to “best practice” guidelines and regulations, many of these schemes reward executives unconditionally with the only factor being them remaining in employment over the vesting period. Despite “best practice” and regulations, firms still appear to be defensive and protect the executives from rigorous scrutiny by shareholders.

Uses longitudinal data from the NLSY79 to examine the effect of a broad variety of performance‐based pay schemes and fringe benefits on male and female wages between 1988 and 1998. Specifically, analyzes whether the offer of various performance‐based pay schemes and fringe benefits functions as an alternative work incentive, eliciting greater effort and raising wages or, instead, it is accompanied by lower wages, as predicted by compensating wage theory. The results indicate that, while most performance‐based pay schemes are associated with higher wages to differing extents across gender, tips are commonly accompanied by lower wages among men. Similarly, while the offer of a retirement plan appears to as a work incentive raising male and female wages, workers are willing to trade wages for jobs offering life and medical insurance.

It is widely agreed that employees’ attitudes towards pay incentives are an important determinant of their effectiveness. The perceived fairness of pay incentives and their determinants are examined. Based on theories dealing with the fairness evaluation of rewards, a number of hypotheses are formulated proposing that employees’ judgements of the fairness of pay incentives will be partly determined by their attitudes towards work and certain situational and personal background factors. The findings generally support these hypotheses. They indicate that the fairness judgements of pay incentive schemes and the considerations underlying such judgements are determined, among other things, by work motivation and by personal background characteristics such as age, education, number of dependants, organisational tenure and country of origin.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate senior managers' satisfaction with pay in the Nigerian Civil Service.

A field study was undertaken to test the hypotheses. The sample was drawn from senior managers in the Nigerian Civil Service. A quantitative methodological approach was used based on questionnaire designed to measure the variables that literature review has identified as having relationship with pay satisfaction.

The finding of this research paper shows that pay incentive scheme is a distinctive dimension of pay satisfaction among senior managers in the Nigerian Civil Service; and the perception of pay‐for‐performance determines the level of satisfaction with pay.

The sample size is very small relative to the total federal civil service population. Only senior managers were selected for questioning and may not reflect the general opinion in the Nigerian Civil Service. The sample is limited to the Federal Civil Service and excludes state and local government services in a federally governed country.

The study has important implications for organisations and human resource practitioners in Nigeria to design their compensation and benefit programmes.

This research is one of the few studies that explore pay incentive schemes as a distinct dimension of pay satisfaction relevant to the Nigerian work environment. It adds value to the study of organisational justice by demonstrating that procedural justice, interactional justice, and distributive justice, influence pay satisfaction.

Under a discontinuous and nonlinear compensation scheme, which is prevalent among car dealerships, the amount of a salesperson’s expected daily commission depends primarily on his position in the pay schedule on the day he makes a sale. Salespeople thus vary their efforts and adopt a different pricing strategy week by week, or even day by day. The purpose of this paper is to examine the incentive effect of such a nonlinear scheme and provide the evidence that salespeople’s behavior is consistent with the theory.

The authors conduct regression analyses using the transaction data provided by two North American auto dealerships. The authors construct a daily measure of varying incentive intensity and evaluate its impact on the distribution of individual daily sales and the dealership’s gross profit rate.

The authors find that the daily measure of varying incentive intensity has a positive effect on the distribution of individual daily sales and a negative impact on the dealership’s gross profit rate. The results suggest that: salespeople adjust their effort levels in response to the intensity of incentives; and they game the system by lowering the prices when the marginal return to doing so is high.

The study shows that there is a high cost associated with the discontinuous nonlinear pay scheme, raising the question of why many auto dealerships use it.

This paper sheds light on the undesirable aspects of discontinuous and nonlinear incentive schemes, varied performance and gaming, by quantifying the effects of the worker’s behavior.

We demonstrate in a laboratory experiment that the effectiveness of performance-contingent incentives is inversely related to risk-aversion levels. For about 16.5% of participants, performance fails to improve under performance-pay, and the probability of such failure increases with risk-aversion. This phenomenon works in part through the reduced effort level of more risk-averse individuals when effort level is positively correlated with risk exposure. It is also associated with higher self-reported levels of stress by more risk-averse people working under performance-contingent pay. We find no evidence of such stress causing decrements in the quality of effort affecting performance after controlling for effort level. However, controlling for effort, more risk-averse participants perform better under a fixed salary, leaving less room for improvement under performance-pay.

By combining structural contingency theory and socio-emotional wealth (SEW) theory, this study aims to identify the organizational determinants of collective performance-related pay (PRP) adoption by examining the interplay between a firm's ownership characteristics (i.e. family or non-family ownership) and other organizational characteristics.

This study adopts a quantitative approach, conducting empirical analyses of a longitudinal dataset of 4,222 Italian companies in the manufacturing sector for 2009–2017. The probability of adopting collective PRP schemes is estimated using the average marginal effects of the probit and linear probability models (LPMs).

The results show that family firms are less likely to adopt collective PRP schemes than non-family firms. Moreover, ceteris paribus, firm characteristics such as size, age and past (firm and labor) productivity are important determinants of firms' adoption of collective incentive pay; however, the significance and magnitude of their effects vary depending on a firm's ownership structure.

This analysis has two major elements of novelty. First, it increases the knowledge of how organizational contingencies differ in family versus non-family contexts regarding pay decisions. Second, it brings new theoretical perspectives to the pay debate by combining structural contingency theory and SEW theory, thus developing new and fertile theoretical grounds for advancing our understanding of the pay determinants. To the best of authors' knowledge, this is one of the first (if any) studies to shed light on collective PRP in family and non-family firms.

To investigate whether significant differences exist in job satisfaction (JS) between individuals receiving performance‐related pay (PRP) and those on alternative compensation plans.

Using data from four waves (1998‐2001) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), a Heckman‐type econometric procedure is applied that corrects for both self‐selection of individuals into their preferred compensation scheme and the endogeneity of wages in a JS framework.

It is found that while the predicted JS of workers receiving PRP is lower on average compared to those on other pay schemes, PRP exerts a positive effect on the mean JS of (very) high‐paid workers. A potential explanation for this pattern could be that for lower‐paid employees PRP is perceived to be controlling, whereas higher‐paid workers derive a utility benefit from what they view as supportive reward schemes.

As the study utilises data from the UK only, its results cannot be generalized to other countries characterized by distinct labour market contexts. Furthermore, the quality of the estimates depends on the quality of the identifying restrictions which, in these types of studies, are always somewhat ad hoc. However, the available tests for evaluating the quality of the identifying restrictions indicated that they are appropriate for the models used.

The findings of the paper suggest that using performance pay as an incentive device in the UK could prove to be counterproductive in the long run for certain low‐paid occupations, as far as employee JS is concerned.

This paper is the first to have attempted to correct for the selectivity issue when considering the effect of PRP on JS. Its implications should be of interest to human resource managers when designing the compensation strategies of their organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how negotiators’ self-evaluated emotion perception is related to value claiming under two incentive schemes. Adopting an ability-motivation interaction perspective, the authors hypothesize that the relationship will be stronger in the contingent (upon value-claiming performance) versus fixed (non-contingent upon value-claiming performance) pay condition.

Multi-level analysis of data (120 participants, 60 dyads) from a laboratory study provided evidence supporting the hypothesis proposed in this paper.

Emotional perception was indeed more strongly related to value claiming in the contingent pay condition than in the fixed pay condition. Negotiators’ emotion perception also had a direct, positive linkage with relationship satisfaction, regardless of the incentive scheme.

The limitations of the current paper include self-report measures of emotion perception, a US student sample and a focus on value claiming as the instrumental outcome. The authors urge future research to address these limitations in replicating and extending the current findings.

The present paper is the first to explicitly test the moderating role of incentive schemes on the linkage between negotiators’ emotion perception and performance. The findings not only show the context-dependent predictive value of negotiators’ emotion perception but also shed light on both negotiation and emotional intelligence (EI) research.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the influence of individual risk preferences on the effectiveness of incentive pay schemes, by examining the link between individual effort and risk aversion in situations where outcome uncertainty multiplies with effort. Such “multiplicative noise” situations are common, occurring whenever payment is awarded per success rather than per attempt.

The paper develops a theoretical model which predicts a negative risk aversion-effort link under multiplicative noise without a performance target (PT), and a weaker negative link once the target is introduced. This model is then taken to the data from a lab experiment where participants were randomly assigned to a control group, which received fixed pay, and a treatment group, which received a piece rate awarded with a certain probability, with and without a PT. Risk aversion is measured with a menu of lottery choices offered at the end of the experiment.

Compared to their peers in the control group, the more risk-averse participants in the treatment group put in progressively less effort in the absence of a PT. The introduction of a PT substantially weakens this negative risk aversion-effort link, so that there are no more significant differences in performance between the more and the less risk averse.

The paper’s findings speak to the empirical puzzles of incentive pay schemes backfiring and of the proliferation of PTs. The negative risk aversion-effort link may be one reason behind the failure of incentive schemes to deliver improved performance, whereas the weakening of this link may be one justification for the existence of PTs.

In the multiplicative noise environments, managers should take their workers’ risk preferences into account when designing incentive pay schemes. A PT may be a useful motivational tool for the risk-averse workers who are more likely to under-perform.

The multiplicative noise environment has been largely overlooked by the existing literature, yet it is common in practice. An example is the work of a sales agent who receives a bonus per sales which succeeds with a certain probability after each customer contact. This paper is one of the first to model, and test experimentally, worker performance in this environment.