Abstract
We are pleased to bring you this latest edition of Compensation & Benefits Review (CBR).
Dow Scott, Conny Antoni, Jacek Grodzicki, Emilio Morales, and Jose Pelaez, the authors of our first article, Global Pay Transparency: An Employee Perspective, take a cross-cultural, multi-country look at differences in employee perceptions of pay transparency and preferences for pay transparency and their relationships with cultural level dimensions (e.g. uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and power distance) as well as employee level dimensions (e.g. intent to quit, pay satisfaction, and perception of pay fairness. Interestingly, they found no significant pattern in the relationship between a country’s level of uncertainty avoidance, individualism, or power distance with the employees’ preference for pay transparency. The authors concede that it was not possible to test this hypothesis statistically, leaving this question open for further research and discussion: How might culture affect preferences for pay transparency? The authors note, “a very strong relationship was found between pay fairness and pay satisfaction” and “significant negative relationships between pay fairness and intent to leave and pay satisfaction and intent to leave.” Of final interest in this article is that the authors found employee preferences for pay transparency to be positively related to actual employer pay transparency. They wonder might there be a selection and retention effect here; might employers’ pay transparency policies shape employee pay transparency preferences? I would also ask if this effect might disappear if culture were held constant. These are questions remaining for further exploration.
Our second article herein - The Effects of Minimum Wage on Tipping: A State-Level Analysis takes a state-by-state (U.S.) look at changes made in tipped-minimum wages. What I particularly found most interesting in the findings is the consistent, state-by-state negative correlation between tip percentages in coffee shops and those in restaurants. The author, Michael Lynn, suggests a few possible explanatory factors, including stronger norms in restaurant tipping versus coffee shop tipping, higher typical bills at restaurants than at coffee shops, and coffee shop employees typically receiving the regular minimum wage while restaurant servers typically receive the tipped minimum wage. I look forward to future researchers’ theoretical reasoning and empirical testing to shed further light on this negative relationship. Overall, Lynn states that the, “findings support the idea that paying tipped workers higher wages decreases the tipped percentages those workers receive,” and that the, “findings should lead policy makers to pause efforts to raise tipped minimum wages pending more research.”
Compensation and benefits structure and design is a blend of art and science, often with a degree of tension between the two, but to the extent that practitioners can dial into that blend appropriate to their organization, that possible tension between the yin and yang of the art and science of compensation and benefits structure design can become synergistic. The article herein entitled A Decision Support Model for Salary Structure, authored by Biniyam Asmare Kassa, resides on the science side of compensation and benefits structure and design. It provides a mathematical, formula-based model for designing salary structure. Kassa recognizes that in salary structure design, there is “a degree of tension between market and internal equity considerations. He offers a decision support model designed to maximize an organization’s compensation structure goals. Finally, Kassa offers the reader a brief look into the use of the model by a particular organization. I would be interested to know how well the new salary structure is doing one to five years down the road. In light of the first article in this issue, I would also like to know about how, or if, the structure is communicated to the organization’s employees and to what extent that communication, or lack thereof, affects the near and long term outcomes of the structure implementation.
To close out this issue, we offer a book review by Peter Ronza of Robert Greene’s 2018 book entitled Rewarding Performance. Ronza describes Rewarding Performance as “a good text to educate human resources professionals on the theory, principles and practices of the discipline,” and “ideal for both the student and practitioner who are seeking knowledge and guidance in the subject.”
Thank you for reading CBR. Enjoy, share with your colleagues, and submit your manuscript today at: https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/author-instructions/CBR