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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.

Explained pay dispersion theory (Shaw, Gupta, & Delery, 2002) contends that the consequences of pay dispersion depend on two critical contingencies: (1) the presence of legitimate or normatively acceptable dispersion-creating practices, and the (2) identifiability of individual contributions. In this chapter, the first 20 years of empirical evidence and theoretical offshoots of this theory are reviewed. Other recent studies on the outcomes of horizontal and vertical pay dispersion are also evaluated. The review concludes with an evaluative summary of the literature and the identification of several potential fruitful areas for future research.

Literature on nontraditional firms has focused on behavioral differences with for-profit firms. Less attention has been given to the variations in behavior among nontraditional firms. This chapter examines differences across three types of Uruguayan nonprofit health care organizations.

This chapter draws on a unique dataset of Uruguayan health care organizations during the period 1982–1990, as well as interviews with doctors working in the three types of nonprofits during spring 2010. We use a simple OLS regression to identify differences in average behavior, and differences in reaction to a regulatory change.

The chapter shows that structure of stake holding and governance significantly affect behavior, even where many behaviors are highly regulated.

These findings highlight the importance of specifying governance structure when predicting behavior of nontraditional firms. Empirical tests of behavioral differences between traditional and nontraditional firms will be more meaningful if the governance structure of nontraditional firms is common and specified. A limitation of our study is our inability to control for the timing of degeneration of producer cooperatives. This would be one element of governance structure to consider in future data collection.

These findings highlight the need to avoid drawing broad policy conclusions from the behavior of a specific subset of nontraditional firms.

This chapter highlights the importance of carefully specifying stakeholder and governance structure when predicting behavior of nontraditional firms. It is of interest to anyone using a sample of nontraditional firms to test general hypotheses about their behavior.

Data from samples of managers from eight countries, Thailand, Nigeria, Philippines, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Spain, and the United States, are used to explore cross-national differences in how individuals make judgments about an individual's pay. A policy-capturing instrument is used to elicit judgments about the ways that variations in individual employee job performance, business unit performance, seniority, schooling, and need affect judgments about pay fairness. Significant between-country differences are found in the sensitivities of pay fairness judgments. However, these differences are not well explained by differences in individualism/collectivism reflected either by a priori categorizations of national culture or direct measures of horizontal/vertical collectivism. Implications for the explanation of cross-national differences are explored.

We report three findings in a comprehensive study of hourly wage differences between women and men working in same occupation and establishment in Sweden in 1970–1990. (1) Within same occupation and establishment in 1990, women on average earn 1.4% less than men among blue-collar workers, 5.0% less among white-collar employees. This occupation-establishment level wage gap declined strongly from 1970 to 1978. (2) For white-collar employees, occupational segregation accounts for much of the wage gap, establishment segregation for little. For blue-collar workers both types of segregation are important. (3) The within-occupation gaps are small, below 4% and 7% for blue- and white-collar workers.

Variable pay, defined as pay that is tied to some measure of a firm’s output, has become more important for executives of the typical American firm. Variable pay is usually touted as a way to provide incentives to managers whose interests may not be perfectly aligned with those of owners. The incentive justification for variable pay has well-known theoretical problems and also appears to be inconsistent with much of the data. Alternative explanations are considered. One that has not received much attention, but is consistent with many of the facts, is selection. Managers and industry specialists may have information about a firm’s prospects that is unavailable to outside investors. In order to induce managers to be truthful about prospects, owners may require managers to “put their money where their mouths are,” forcing them to extract some of their compensation in the form of variable pay. The selection or sorting explanation is consistent with the low elasticities of pay to output that are commonly observed, with the fact that the elasticity is higher in small and new firms, with the fact that variable pay is more prevalent in industries with very technical production technologies, and with the fact that stock and stock options are a larger proportion of total compensation for higher level employees. The explanation fits small firms and start-ups better than larger, well-established firms.

This paper is an investigation of the pay-for-performance link in executive compensation. In particular, we document main issues in the pay–performance debate and explain practical issues in setting pay as well as data issues including how pay is disclosed and how that has changed over time. We also provide a summary of the state of CEO pay levels and pay mix in 2009 using a sample of over 2,000 companies and describe main data sources for researchers. We also investigate what we believe to be at the root of fundamental confusion in the literature across disciplines – methodological issues. In exploring methodological issues, we focus on empirical specifications, causality, fixed-effects, first-differencing, and instrumental variable issues. We then discuss two important but not yet well-explored areas, international issues, and compensation in non-profits. We conclude by examining a series of research areas where further work can be done, within and across disciplines.

We review the existing laboratory experimental studies on corruption that have generated results with clear policy implications. We present and discuss experimental findings on the role that both monetary incentives and nonmonetary motivations may play in corruption decision-making, and, hence, in the fight against corruption.

In this chapter I provide a sociological discussion of the gender pay gap legalisation by drawing on data in the sport sector across public and private commercial sports organisations. The gender pay gap is a significant reporting tool as it refers to the difference in the average hourly wage of all men compared to all women across an organisation (gov.uk, 2020). It is part of legislation introduced in the UK in 2017 which requires all employers with 250 or more employees to calculate and publish annually their gender pay gap data (gov.uk, 2020). The patterns emerging from the data indicate that the highest disparity in gender pay remains in those organisations where professional sport is commercialised around male performance (average gender pay gap is 59.1% in 2018–2019). In this chapter I draw on figurational concepts of power that enable the analysis of gender relations processually and draw on the role of shame and embarrassment to discuss the ways in which gender pay gap reporting may be used as a power resource to challenge ongoing inequalities in sport governance.