Quotes:
What our colleagues think!
Most leading organizational, human resource, and compensation scholars and practitioners advocate the alignment of pay with business strategies and economic results. Presented below, for informational purposes, are a few illustrative quotes appearing in recent scholarly literature:
“The new reality treats incentive systems as a management tool that can be designed specifically to fit small groups of workers. This perspective is reinforced by the exploding interest in teams and the evidence that employees are more likely to become effective team members if they are rewarded for team results.”
Howard Risher
Senior Fellow
Center for Human Resources
Wharton School
“How businesses compensate people, in fact, may have the greatest influence on the organizational culture. Reward systems motivate; employees will do things that bring them added recompense. Reward systems direct employees’ efforts by reinforcing the behaviors that produce the rewards. Reward systems communicate by conveying management’s priorities, and clearly have a powerful influence on the organization’s culture.”
John G. Belcher, Jr.
Founder & President
J. G. Belcher Associates
“Research indicates that for a group incentive plan to succeed, its primary purpose should be to align the organization’s performance goals with the reward opportunities available to employees. By aligning the organization’s interest with the interests of employees, a mutual sharing of risks and rewards is achieved…Finally, it is important to gauge the degree of change employees are likely to make based on the pay opportunity. Behavioral change that leads to desired performance is based on discretionary effort. Employees will choose the degree of extra effort they expend based on the value of the reward.”
Thomas B. Wilson
President
Wilson Group
“When organizations reorganize and ask individuals to pursue new strategic objectives, failing to change the reward system can hamper the change. All too often organizations expect dramatic changes in behavior because of an announced reorganization, when in fact the reward system is communicating that change is undesirable.”
Edward E. Lawler III
Director
Center for Effective Organizations
“Behavior-centered management stresses that outcomes are caused by the behavior of people. Therefore, behaviors that lead to unsatisfactory outcomes can and should be changed.”
John M. Marr and Richard T. Roessler
Professors
Department of Clinical Psychology
University of Arkansas
“Compensation is a critical piece of an overall human resource strategy. Because compensation is both visible and important to employees, a compensation program designed to communicate and reward strategic goals increases the probability that employees not only will understand what those goals are but also achieve them.”
George T. Milkovich
Professor
School of Industrial and Labor Relations
and
Founder
Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies
Cornell University,
and
Renae F. Broderick
Managing Director and Senior Research Consultant
Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies
School of Industrial and Labor Relations
Cornell University.
* The quotes referenced above and their copyrights belong to the respective authors and/or their publishers.