国际人力资源管理中的薪酬制度

INTRODUCTION

Pfeffer (1998) asserts that although people work for money, they also work to find

meaning and a sense of identity, and Kohn (1998) goes further, to suggest that extrinsic

reward erodes intrinsic interest. Yet pay is often prominent in management discussions

of people management. People are the largest single operating cost item of most

businesses and there is also a need to motivate employees and/or engender their active

commitment or engagement. Moreover, pay might appear a natural focus of activity for

HRM departments, in light of the possibility of relatively direct leverage over pay

practices. Yet the differing approaches to reward apparent in different countries – and

the different contexts of reward in them – suggest that this is a particularly challenging

area in the international and comparative context.

The influential expectancy theory suggests that motivation and performance are shaped

by the links between effort and reward and by the significance or valence of the

reward to the person in question. This underpins Lawler s (1990) notion that line of

sight is the crucial issue in the design of reward packages. Accordingly, a good deal of

thinking and discussion about reward now centres on motivation and, more specifically,

on incentivisation. For senior managers and executives it has long been assumed that

keen incentivisation through pay is necessary, and there has over the last few decades

been growing interest in extending this beyond these groups, and beyond managerial

hierarchies, to front-line employees. We return to the effects of the period of crisis in

the OECD since the financial woes of 2008 on employers deployment of immediate

and short-term incentives, and indeed more general attitudes to reward, later.

This chapter briefly surveys the bases on which pay packages may be constructed. It

goes on to consider in detail comparative variation in practice, with a focus on the

situation regarding attachments of pay to post or role and then the various forms of pay