Does wage rank affect employees' well-being? (2008)
Authors
Abstract
How do workers make wage comparisons? Both an experimental study and an analysis of 16,000 British employees are reported. Satisfaction and well-being levels are shown to depend on more than simple relative pay. They depend upon the ordinal rank of an individual's wage within a comparison group. "Rank" itself thus seems to matter to human beings. Moreover, consistent with psychological theory, quits in a workplace are correlated with pay distribution skewness.
Bibliographic entry
Brown, G. D. A., Gardner, J., Oswald, A. J., & Qian, J. (2008). Does wage rank affect employees' well-being? Industrial Relations, 47, 355-389. (Full text)