1、中文 3600 字 原文 ： 外文出处 International Foundation News 外文作者 Frank L.Giancola A Framework for Understanding New Concepts in Compensation management Over the past 25 years, several major new concepts in compensation management have reflected overly ambitious goals . Experts have disagreed about their basic
2、 premises, and the business world has had trouble accepting them. Examining the history of three such concepts-skill-based pay, broadbanding and total rewards -is worthwhile , for it reveals the challenges they present and helps define a pattern for how professionals deal with these and other new id
3、eas in the profession . Skill -Based Pay The skill -based approach for determining base pay is based on an employees skills, rather than his or her current job. Leading thinkers in compensation management have supported this approach since the 1980s. According to compensation experts Patricia Zinghe
4、im and Jay Schuster it is the “next great thing in pay and benefits”. In an interview Edward Lawler called it “the compensation system of the future.” This approach shifts the focal point from the job to the person, with the goals of providing employees with greater incentives to improve skills and
5、competencies and giving management a more versatile workforce. Generally, employees are paid to acquire higher skills in their own field or lateral ones in related fields. From a systems standpoint, job descriptions, job evaluation plans and job-based salary surveys are replaced by skill profiles, s
6、kill evaluation plans and skill-based salary surveys. The disappearance of the traditional job provides the primary rationale for this change. Today， employees are said to have variable and unstable work assignments , with roles that cannot be assigned a valid pay rate in traditional job evaluation
7、plans . Contentious Tenets The main tenets of skill-based pay (SBP) conflict with mainstream business thinking. The first tenet is that pay should be based only on skills, taking the value of an employees work to an organization out of the pay equation. In effect, SBP advocates are asking compensati
8、on professionals to set the same pay rate for employees, based on their skills, even though they might have substantially different duties and responsibilities and make substantially different contributions to a firms success. The omission of something of fundamental value to the firm makes the conc
9、ept a hard sell with managers and employees. In recent years, compensation experts have affirmed the value of work as an essential part of the pay equation. The second tenet is the notion that pay should be based on how many skills employees have or how many jobs they potentially can do , not on the
10、 job they currently hold . Here again, SBP advocates make what many firms consider an unreasonable request. They introduce a controversial pay for potential concept that directly contradicts the pay for performance concept compensation professionals have diligently strived to establish. In recent ye
11、ars, emphasis has been on what employees actually accomplish on the job, rather than on static concepts relating to who they are, such as their management potential or length of service. Also, by asking firms to pay employees for a job that they might perform in the future, SBP is a practice few fir
12、ms could afford. With these core beliefs, SBP has experienced an uphill battle for acceptance as the primary means to determine base pay. Questionable Assumption The SBP concept rests on a questionable assumption -that a job does not reflect the skills of the person required to do it. That makes job
13、 evaluation plans an inappropriate method for evaluating skills and setting pay rates. According to SBP advocates, skills must be valued by using market-based skill surveys. They overlook the fact that most point-factor job evaluation plans award the bulk of their points for the possession and appli
14、cation of knowledge, skills and abilities. On this point, Lawler has stated ,“In many cases , this ( skill-based pay ) will not produce dramatically different pay rates than are produced by paying for the nature of the job . After all, the skills that people have usually match reasonably well the jo
15、bs that they are doing.” Also overlooked is the fact that many occupations (e.g., accountant, electrician and actuary) do reflect the skills required to perform them； when salary surveys are conducted and employees are paid based on occupation titles and job summaries , skill requirements are being
16、valued . Ambiguous Definition Few “new” ideas in compensation management represent a complete break from the prior ideas. Although SBP was billed as a new idea in compensation when introduced, it included old compensation practices, such as career ladders and generalist classifications. The result i
17、s that today， when companies are surveyed to see if they use SBP practices , those that use old SBP practices are counted among the firms that have signed on to the concept . This gives a false picture about the adoption of this “new”, way of paying employees and contributes to varying descriptions
18、of the concepts level of acceptance. Competency-Based Pay In the 1990s, competency-based pay was introduced as a type of SBP plan for professional and managerial employees. It calls for base pay to be determined based on competencies instead of duties and responsibilities. Shortly after the concept
19、was introduced, controversy arose as to what constitutes a legitimate competency. Today, there are many alternatives to choose fromcore, organizational, behavioral and technical competencies. One compensation expert has asked for a governing body, similar to those in the accounting profession, to he
20、lp sort out what the term competency actually means in the world of employee compensation. Changes in the economy and the nature of worksuch as the rise of the contingent workforce and the disappearance of traditional jobs, which were predicted to result in a need for SBPhave not materialized. That
21、and the lack of administrative support systems probably have contributed to the concepts slow growth. Today, SBP is associated with blue-collar workers in manufacturing industries, which are in decline in the United States, while competency-based pay has had a greater impact on performance managemen
22、t than on base pay. Despite these issues and setbacks, prominent compensation experts continue to support the concept. Broadbanding One of the most visible concepts in compensation management in the 1990s was broadbanding, which collapses many salary grades and ranges into fewer bands with broader s
23、alary spans. Its popularity was attributed in part to the 1990s trend to downsize organizations by reducing the number of hierarchical levels. When broadbanding was introduced, some thought leaders saw it as a new pay program for managing salaries and supporting organizational initiatives, such as e
24、liminating bureaucracy and reducing costs.Others saw it as a “higher order of change” and a new way of managing human resources that would be a catalyst for organizational change and represent much more than a new way to reduce bureaucracy and costs. The concept was loosely defined, and companies we
25、re said to have welcomed the opportunity to adapt it to their unique needs. And some were given credit for adopting it, even though one cited plan had 13 bands, with multiple salary ranges within them, making it resemble a traditional salary administration plan. Flexibility One constant in the dialo
26、gue on broadbanding is that it provides the flexibility to accommodate change and to define job responsibilities more broadly. Proponents have dismissed traditional salary administration systems as being too structured, with too many rules. Execution Issues Early experience with broadbanding was not
27、 completely positive. Although these systems were supposed to reduce costs, managers had too much discretion to increase salaries within the bands. After several years, salaries had progressed to levels that could not be justified. “Second generation” banded systems gave less freedom for managers to
28、 determine salaries. These systems include more bands and specifically define salary ranges within the bands,making them resemble the traditional systems they were supposed to replace. Two compensation textbooks have reserved final judgment on the value of broadbanding. One sees it as a potential reprise of the type of salary administration “flexibility” that gave rise to the traditional plans. These plans were developed to reduce favoritism and inconsistencies that resulted from a lack of structure and controls that exist in broadbanding.
