Pay Transparency Can Push Reward Inequities Under the Table

Three Types of Pay Transparency Are Changing the Game

By Daniel Butcher

While there isn’t a nationwide pay-transparency law in the United States—at least not yet—10 states, several cities, and even one county (Westchester, New York) have such regulations. That means organizations may need to adjust how they communicate about pay depending on where they’re based and where they operate.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said one type of transparency is letting employees freely talk about their pay with one another. That’s been protected by U.S. federal law since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935.

“Most employees don’t know that they have the right to talk about their pay with other employees—that’s part of the NLRA. Still, companies discourage it, and in fact, some companies go too far in discouraging it so that they’re actually breaking the law,” Bamberger said.

“There’s very little merit to stopping employee disclosure, particularly since we now have things like Glassdoor, which really make it easy for employees to find out what others are earning in return for disclosing their own compensation,” he said.

In the second type of pay transparency, employers disclose compensation ranges to current and prospective employees.

“Laws in more than a dozen U.S. states and several cities are pushing for some degree of partial transparency with mandatory employer disclosure of pay ranges,” Bamberger said.“Going beyond that, where it’s not ranges that employers show, but rather actual individual rates of pay, can be potentially risky.

“Our studies have found that letting employees see how much coworkers make tends to have some pretty detrimental effects, whether it comes to malicious envy or even counterproductive work behavior,” he said. “The comp ranges not so much, but revealing detail about how much specific individuals are making can be problematic, so you have to be very careful about how you go about doing it.

“There are some success stories that I’ve written about in a book that I wrote about pay transparency, but it can be problematic.”

The third type is procedural pay transparency, from which Bamberger and his research colleagues have found only positive outcomes.

“That is being open and transparent about every aspect of the pay system in your organization, telling employees about the basis of the compensation structure, for example, what are the criteria for increasing bonuses? How were bonuses calculated this past year? How are differential pay rates by levels in the organization determined?” Bamberger said.

“Most employees don’t have a clue as to what their benefits are or how compensation levels are determined in the organization—employee pay knowledge is really minimal,” he said.

“Where organizations enhance this procedural pay transparency, perceptions of justice and fairness increased dramatically, and that has a wide range of beneficial effects and implications on retention, social exchange and reciprocity among coworkers, and giving back to the organization.”

Mentors Influence How Much College Grads Drink

By Daniel Butcher

The quality of mentorship can be a key factor in early-career professionals surviving and thriving at an organization. And more specifically, senior executives’ alcohol use, especially while entertaining clients, has a big influence on junior employees’ drinking habits.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that for at least the three years after graduation, alcohol consumption levels typically don’t change much. But there’s a caveat.

“We do find a couple of factors that are instrumental in getting alcohol consumption to move, which gives managers some clues as to what might be done to speed up that maturing out process for junior employees and hopefully reduce the risk of managers having to deal with people with problem drinking,” Bamberger said. “This is a soft side of the socialization process when these young adults come into the organization, so some of the most instrumental factors have to do with mentoring programs, veteran employees who are there to support the newcomers.

“You have to be a little bit careful there, because we did another study in China, where we found that, for employees in sales and sales-support occupations who are social connectors, post-college alcohol consumption moves in the wrong direction,” he said. “Many young people coming into these positions within three months after graduation show patterns of hazardous drinking.

“We demonstrate that, in such cases, their ‘mentors’ are their clients who end up ‘teaching’ them how critical it is to drink in order to build trust and close the deal—now, this may be more of a sales-department client-related phenomenon, and it may be more intense in China than other parts of the world.”

In China, it’s well-known that salespeople can’t close a deal unless they show their clients a good time the night before a meeting. Such occasions often include heavy drinking. However, Bamberger notes that many companies based in many countries worldwide, including across Europe and the United States, have salespeople and clients who also have behavioral patterns like that.

“The socialization [process] is [influenced by] mentoring by certain individuals, which can be problematic,” Bamberger said. “But our study with a college students in the U.S. finds that where you have that kind of support, particularly with newcomers mentored by veterans with low or moderate levels of drinking, you can expedite the pace at which young adults mature out of this pattern of a high level of alcohol consumption.

“There are other factors and things that managers can do [to help expedite that maturation process] as well, some of them having less of an effect, including a review of alcohol-drinking policies as part of the orientation program—our findings are that that doesn’t do very much,” he said.

“Managers do need to look at what else worked to reduce problem drinking among their younger team members.”

Pay Transparency Boosts Performance, Retention of Top Performers

By Daniel Butcher

Pay transparency laws can motivate star employee stay with companies and boost their performance, while spurring poor-performing working to quit.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University has conducted extensive research on pay transparency, including experiments to study the implications of pay transparency and secrecy on turnover.

“We found that pay transparency generated higher retention for higher performers, but other studies done by economists found that transparency is associated with higher rates of turnover, in other words, lower retention—so we have a disconnect there,” Bamberger said.

“But there are some indications that the turnover was higher among low performers, whereas, among high performers, that transparency didn’t generate a higher rate of turnover; in those studies, transparency may not have generated higher retention, like we found, but most of the turnover that those researchers found in their field study was with lower performers,” he said.

In other words, it’s a win-win situation for leaders and managers: Greater compensation transparency does not tend to encourage high-performing (and presumably well-paid) employees to leave the organization, while it does give a nudge to low-performing (and presumably modestly paid) employees to seek employment elsewhere.

“When workers don’t know what their colleagues are making, natural biases cause many to underestimate what we call ‘instrumentality perceptions,’ the instrumental role of extra effort to achieve the right incentive benefits in driving returns,” Bamberger said. “Their motivation is lower when pay is secret, and the result is, over time, a lower growth curve in performance.

“The slope of improvement is flatter when workers don’t know how much money colleagues earn than it is when pay is transparent and they can see how they’re doing relative to others,” he said.

The main takeaway is that pay transparency boosts performance and retention of top performers while leading to turnover of poor and middling performers.

Pay Transparency May Breed Malicious Envy

By Daniel Butcher

Overall, researchers have found that pay transparency benefits organizations with fair compensation structures by incentivizing top performers to continue working hard and reducing turnover of talented contributors. But in certain situations, it can breed envy of high earners and undermine organizational culture.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University explained that envy can be either benign or malicious, with benign envy increasing a person’s motivation to help others, while malicious envy tends to decrease motivation. Bamberger said that in cases he studied where pay transparency bred malicious envy among colleagues, the frequency of employees helping one another decreased.

“So if I’m envious of you, and I can see that you’re having difficulties at work, will I help without you coming to me and asking for assistance? Will I come to you and say, ‘Hey, I can see you’re having some problems, here’s advice or some type of information that could help you solve some of the problems that you’re experiencing?’” Bamberger said.

“I’m less likely to do that if I’m feeling envy toward you, and I’m more likely to feel envy toward you under conditions of pay transparency,” he said.

“For people who are natural helpers, it won’t make much of a difference, but for most people, particularly among those who are more competitive or have less prosocial motivation, it can make a big difference.”

Some business leaders and managers complain that transparency is problematic, because it makes people jealous, but Bamberger and his colleagues didn’t buy that argument. Their hypothesis was that people are jealous whether pay is transparent or not, and they imagine what other people’s pay is and base their jealousy on that.

“Whether or not employees see other people’s pay, it’s still a basis for jealousy, because they believe the worst,” Bamberger said. “The difference when pay is transparent is that it’s slammed in your face, and you can’t deny it, and therefore, it’s particularly in that case where the malicious envy can be sufficiently robust to be problematic, while one of these problems was reduced unsolicited helping among coworkers.”

Pay Transparency Reduces Compensation Differentials

By Daniel Butcher

Pay transparency can lead to pay compression, in which employees’ compensation—regardless of whether they’re long-tenured or new, high-performing or just sliding by—tend to cluster around an average or median level for a particular role.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that people perceive their employer’s compensation structure to be unfair tend to leave the organization. In those cases, pay transparency can interfere with employee retention goals. But he’s found in his research that pay can be a moving target, where pressure to recruit can drive up new hires’ compensation, higher than longer-tenured employees serving in similar roles.

“It’s important to see what the impact of pay transparency is on individual behavior, but we also want to see what happens with turnover rates at the firm level,” Bamberger said. “The argument was based on several research papers in economics in particular with consistent findings that when pay becomes more transparent, it also becomes more compressed.

“Essentially, managers differentiate between stars and poor performers less and give everybody more or less the same or a similar raise and bonus,” he said.

While the economists didn’t really look at the mechanism as to why that is, Bamberger and his colleagues did examine that and came up with a theory to explain the trend.

“The argument is that managers are kind of lazy, and they prefer not to have to deal with an employee coming in and demanding that they deserve more than someone else,” Bamberger said. “So when pay is transparent, regardless of differences in individual contribution, they just give everyone the same level of pay increase or bonus.”

Transparency Helps Orgs that Pay Employees Fairly

By Daniel Butcher

Organizations with merit-based raises and bonuses deemed equitable by employees benefit from pay transparency by incentivizing top-tier performers to put in maximum effort and stay at the organization, while encouraging many bottom-tier performers to look for new jobs.

“The bottom line, what we found is that people’s perceptions of the fairness of pay in their organization had a big impact on the degree to which transparency was associated with higher or lower rates of turnover,” Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said. “And a lot of that can be explained by people’s perceptions of trust.

“Where employees have a sense that pay is distributed fairly, you get a lot of benefits from pay transparency with regard to reduced turnover, because essentially, in most cases, where people believe that pay is fair, pay transparency is showing that the pay is, in fact, fair,” he said.

“And it’s driving higher levels of trust, which encourage people to stay in the organization, and in those situations where people are feeling that the pay is unfair, it’s typically people who are performing less well and are rewarded less well, transparency can be problematic, because then you’re actually making it obvious to them that they’re not doing as well and they’re likely to leave to look for greener pastures.”

In this way, Bamberger and colleagues were able to explain inconsistent findings regarding pay transparency and turnover in prior studies. They explained these mixed effects by showing that pay transparency can both increase and reduce turnover.

“For people who are performing well in an organization and getting those higher rewards and feel that their pay is fair, transparency drives higher retention, but for those who are feeling that their pay is unfair, perhaps because they’re getting lower rewards, typically transparency can actually drive higher rates of turnover,” he said.

Bamberger and his fellow researchers looked at employees’ overall perceptions of pay fairness, regardless of what their frame of reference was in terms of level of seniority or job title.

“What we found is when the two are aligned, high transparency with high perceptions of justice, they’re getting higher retention,” he said. “When there’s high transparency with lower perceptions of justice, we were seeing higher levels of turnover.”

Two Factors that Determine Young Professionals’ Drinking Levels

By Daniel Butcher

Early-career professionals often drink as much alcohol as they did in college or even more after graduation, especially if they’re working in a sales role with a boss or mentor who drinks a lot, research shows. But young workers in roles that make them feel empowered and who are surrounded by supportive coworkers who tend to drink alcohol in moderation are more likely to deal with socialization and stress in healthy ways and avoid problem drinking.

That’s according to Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University, who said supportive peer relationships with abstainers or moderate drinkers can be influential, as can jobs that provide a higher level of psychological empowerment.

“A combination of the two—peer support and empowerment—make it so that people aren’t as stressed out by being given roles and tasks that they may not be able to handle, because underlying a lot of what’s involved with this drinking are two main motivations,” Bamberger said. “One is a normative social motivation to go out and drink to become socially integrated in their workplace.

“The second is a stress motivation: ‘This is how I coped with stress in college; I went out to drink, and now I do the same thing at work,’” he said. “One of the critical things that we show in our research studies is that if managers can find alternative ways of coping with stress, actually being proactive in terms of trying to address some of the stressors that newcomers face at work, like uncertainty, they may be able to speed up that maturing out process that can lead to reduced levels of alcohol consumption among early-career professionals.

“Support from peers and psychological empowerment were keys to success in that.”

Binge Drinking Decreases After College, Right? Not So Fast…

By Daniel Butcher

Contrary to popular belief, university students don’t get drinking out of their systems during their college years before entering the workforce. Studies show drinking levels increase after graduation and peak in the mid-20s.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that especially for some client-facing roles such as sales, on-the-job pressures and social situations often lead to increased alcohol consumption among young professionals.

“The common perception is that people’s drinking is at its highest levels for young adults, at least when they’re in college, and then as soon as they get out of college, they take on employment; they start their career, and their drinking very quickly declines,” Bamberger said. “However, there’s been some indication already for the past 10 years that that may not be the case.

“In fact, the data on young adults shows that, particularly among college students and twenty-somethings, the peak levels of alcohol use and misuse are actually at around ages 25 and 26, and they’re continuously rising after graduation,” he said. “It’s not like people graduate from college and mature out of their drinking—the party continues.”

Bamberger and colleagues have studied different profiles of alcohol drinkers. Their research findings don’t always align with popular narratives about booze consumption.

“We’ve looked at how people drink alcoholic beverages, how frequently and when they drink, and there are certain patterns that are more problematic than others,” Bamberger said. “First of all, where individuals engage in heavy episodic drinking, like binge drinking, and they do it more frequently, and they do it not necessarily only on a weekend but during the week as well, that’s a very risky pattern.

“And then you have more in the middle of the range, moderate traits and patterns, and then you have patterns like only drinking socially or only on special occasions, and you have abstainers, but and most college students do drink—most are not abstainers,” he said.

“We have these three patterns among people who drink, and when we look at the likelihood of people shifting from a really risky pattern of heavy drinking to a more moderate pattern, or from a moderate pattern to light drinking, what we find is that these patterns are in fact rather sticky.”

Young Heavy Drinkers in Non-STEM Jobs Earn More Money

By Daniel Butcher

There is no meaningful correlation between levels of alcohol consumption and compensation among early-career professionals working in roles focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). But heavy drinking is associated with higher pay for non-STEM professionals who are recent college graduates.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that he and colleagues have researched levels of alcohol consumption and compensation of STEM professionals versus those working in non-STEM fields.

“We were looking at the link between consumption patterns and income growth in the initial years of employment after graduating from college, and surprisingly, what we found is a positive relationship between drinking and income growth in non-STEM roles,” Bamberger said.

“The findings are actually capturing the dynamic that, if you’re not in a STEM job and you want to move up in the organization, you need to engage in these social practices that often revolve around alcohol, and the more you do that, the higher your growth in income is going to be,” he said.

That finding is—at least in part—tied to the prevalence of non-STEM professionals working in sales, marketing, distribution, customer-service, and business-development roles who routinely partake in adult beverages while meeting with clients and prospects.

“A lot of non-STEM people are engaging in marketing and sales and support in building and maintaining relationships with customers,” Bamberger said. “In STEM roles, they’re working in a lab or in front of a computer terminal coding, so there’s less of a role for alcohol as a basis for increasing your salary—drinking is not going to do a hell of a lot for your career if your role isn’t client-facing, right?

“But early-career non-STEM salespeople who drink on the job with clients may be more likely to get promoted and rewarded financially,” he said. “That was the logic behind the research, and that’s what we actually found.”

However, there’s an obvious caveat. Bamberger noted that recent research shows that daily alcohol intake—even in moderate amounts—increases drinkers’ risk of health issues.

“There have been a couple of studies that have come out recently that that directly contradict the line that’s been pushed a lot by a lot of the alcoholic-beverages companies, which is that having some wine with your meal every day is going to prolong your life—it’s healthy,” Bamberger said.

“You’re best off not drinking any alcohol whatsoever, not so much because of its implications on mental health, but rather largely because of its implications with respect to alcohol as a carcinogen, specifically as a leading cause of esophageal cancer,” he said.

“Many younger employees nowadays recognize the risks in drinking; a lot of young people are actually picking up on those problematic implications of drinking alcohol even at the lowest levels and understanding that health risk.”

Why Retirees Change Their Alcohol Consumption

By Daniel Butcher

Whether people increase or decrease the amount of alcohol they drink after retirement depends on a range of factors, including what role and industry they retire from.

Academy of Management Scholar Peter Bamberger of Tel Aviv University said that he and colleagues studied the implications of general work-related transitions on health and well-being, with a particular focus on subjects’ behavior with regard to drinking alcohol, before and after retirement.

“We actually started with people as they move towards retirement, and we did a 10-year study,” Bamberger said. “The research was finding mixed effects of retirement on alcohol consumption; some studies found that retirement is a great way to address your drinking problems, because you’re often removing people from a high-risk environment where people around them drink a lot.

“But other studies were finding that people go into retirement and move into a retirement community and happy hour starts at noon,” he said.

Bamberger’s and colleagues’ question was, ‘Is retirement good or bad with regard to alcohol consumption or misuse?’ They were looking at various factors that determine when a person’s level of drinking goes in one direction and when it goes in the other direction.

“A simple finding is, if you’re coming out of a high-risk occupation, for example, iron workers, people who build skyscrapers—this is an occupation that has its roots with very heavy drinking communities, so if you joined that occupation, at least in the past, you were likely to adopt those patterns, or you wouldn’t stay in the occupation,” Bamberger said. “So retiring from that is obviously going to be beneficial, because you’re taking yourself out of a social context of high alcohol consumption.”

But there are other variables to consider, including relationships with friends, family, and spouses. A best practice for retirees is keeping busy with hobbies, volunteerism, or even some part-time work, any activity aimed at staying engaged and connected and ensuring a continuing sense of self-worth and contribution.

“We looked at some of the factors that are associated with retirement, like financial stress and marital strain, with one member of a couple working the other one not, and we can find implications there as well for drinking,” Bamberger said. “The routine is disrupted; there’s more free time for one partner in the relationship but not the other.

“There’s a vast array of moderating and conditioning factors that determine when retirement has one implication—more drinking—versus another—less drinking,” he said. “Retirees who plan how to structure their time post-separation from work tend to have better health outcomes.

“Overall, work-related transitions can be difficult for people, and our current research has aimed at exploring the mental-health implications of other such transitions, including for students and soldiers transitioning into career employment for the first time.”