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In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.

The purpose of this paper is to make a comparative assessment of the relationship between types of pay plans and several workforce‐level outcomes in 214 organizations. The plans include pay that is skill‐based, job‐based, and market‐based. The types of workforce‐level outcomes include workforce flexibility, attitudes, membership behaviors, and productivity. The paper also assesses the relationship between the success of pay plans and workforce productivity/membership behaviors.

Survey data from 214 organizations are used to test the hypothesized relationships using hierarchical regression analysis and partial least square techniques.

Results support a significant and positive relationship between skill‐based pay plans, workforce flexibility, and workforce attitudes. Skill‐based pay plans, when compared with market‐based pay plans, are found to positively relate to workforce membership behaviors, and workforce attitudes mediate this relationship. Similarly, workforce flexibility mediates the positive relationship between skill‐based plans and workforce productivity. The success of skill‐based plans depends on significant improvements in workforce productivity and membership behaviors. The fit between the pay plan and the facility's climate/culture moderates the relationship between workforce productivity and the pay plan's success.

The results indicate that skill‐based pay plans are superior for achieving several organizational and employee outcomes. The authors discuss the implications of these results for research and practice.

Limited comparative empirical evidence exists on the effects of different types of pay systems on organizational outcomes. The paper seeks to address this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to test alternative conceptualizations of the relationship between systems of human resource management (HRM) practices and organizational effectiveness. The authors describe a framework suggesting a complex relationship between HRM practices and organizational effectiveness, test this approach empirically in a large sample of US motor carriers, and compare the results to those derived using other approaches prevalent in the strategic HRM literature.

The study used a large scale cross-sectional survey design. In a sample of US motor carriers, questionnaires completed by senior HRM department staff were used as the primary data. The data were supplemented by organizational effectiveness data reported by motor carriers to the US Government.

The results support the general hypothesis that HRM practices enhance organizational effectiveness, provide some evidence that HRM practices can enhance each other’s effectiveness, and underscore the value of theory driven methodological approaches. Specifically, the authors found that HRM system comprising practices that ensure selectivity in staffing, performance-based pay, and enhanced employee opportunity through participation in decision-making result in higher levels of organizational effectiveness. Additionally, the effects of other combinations of these practices varied.

This study highlights the need for HRM departments and organizations to approach the strategic management of employees with a systems perspective. The optimal design of an HRM strategy must take into account the various components.

This study is one of the first to test the main assumptions of the systems perspective in strategic HRM using multiple measures and empirical approaches for combining HRM practices into systems. Comparison of these different approaches in a single study offers insight into how researchers can test the relationship between HRM practices and organizational effectiveness and provide practitioners more useful approaches for designing HRM systems.

We review our work as collaborators over nearly 40 years as researchers and OD practitioners on the human, cultural, and organizational aspects of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). This chapter addresses (1) how our thinking, research methods, and practices developed over time, (2) accounts of deriving theory from practice and contrariwise of applying theory to practical matters, (3) how our respective shifts from academe toward scholarly-practice influenced our thinking and how we write, and (4) varieties of scholarly collaboration – ranging from intensive interchange to sequential pitch and catch. Early work covers a study of a “white-knight” acquisition and then advising on post-merger integration in a hostile takeover, revealing the stages of a deal, dynamics of buyers and sellers, and human factors that produce the “merger syndrome.”

Throughout we talk about confronting challenges of the scholar-practitioner divide as it pertains to role definition and boundary management as well to our theorizing, writing, and publication agenda. The chapter concludes with reflections on doing applied research in collaboration with a colleague (and friend).

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework that clarifies the construct of pay secrecy.

Paralleling organizational justice research, two continua of pay information – a distributive continuum about pay raise outcomes and a procedural continuum of pay raise processes – are crossed to produce a 3 × 3 matrix with nine distinct forms of pay communication.

Drawing on the substitutability effect from the organizational justice literature, the matrix highlights the importance of considering how the communication of different types of pay information interact with one another as individuals form pay perceptions.

The matrix framework illustrates that not only information content shapes pay perceptions, but also the extent to which different types of pay information are communicated, and how these different types of information interact. As with any conceptual framework, the current manuscript is limited by a lack of empirical testing.

Managers should be cognizant of the many different ways in which pay information can be communicated. A call is made to reconsider the use of traditionally binary terminology (secret or not) in favor of more accurate descriptions of the nuanced ways in which organizations communicate pay information.

The value of the pay communication matrix lies in the nine unique forms of pay communication arising from the interaction of two different forms of pay information – distributive (outcomes) and procedural (process).