管理风格和公正的工资制度外文文献.doc

Management Style and FairPaymentTom HusbandThis article discusses the relationship between management style within a firm and the procedures used to determine internal wage and salary differentials. At a time when management styles are apparently becoming less authoritarian and paternalistic in favour of greater worker participation there is obviously a danger of firms using payment techniques which are inappropriate to the current management/worker relationship. Some simple models of workers and organization are used to identify four broad styles of management. These styles are then related to the job evaluation and performance rating techniques in common use in British industry today. Some general conclusions are drawn concerning future trends in payment to suit management style.IntroductionProblems of internal pay structuring have always been of keen interest to both managers and students of British industry. In recent years however the setting of rational and fair pay differentials has taken on a particular significance. Our social and managerial attitudes to criteria for reward are changing fast. The whole question of pay relativities is now seen to be central to the establishment of a just industrial society. Within individual firms managers and employees are questioning the traditional approaches to work structuring and wage payment. There is a distinct move from both sides of industry towards a greater degree of employee consultation and participation in the running of the firm. This trend has brought with it fresh approaches to the analysis of work and the determination of equitable wage and salary differentials.A great many British companies have already applied themselves to solving the dynamic problems of work analysis and reward. The majority are probably only now deciding how best to approach these same problems. It is fair to say that a great deal of confusion and even controversy surrounds the issues involved. In the last decade managers have been deluged with new techniques of pay administration.All of these techniques are valid when applied under appropriate conditions. The dilemma which has faced managers is to know which of the techniques is relevant to the solution of their particular problems. There have been many sad cases of mismatch between technique and situation.Managers need an overall company strategy for work analysis and pay. The integration of techniques into a total package of wage and salary administration must reflect the management style employed in the company, as well as recognize the many constraints put on managerial control.Many companies are now facing up to situations where management styles are altering and technological and other influences are changing fast. The company pay strategy has to mirror these changes if it is to remain effective.Ideally the internal payment structure should reflect the organization structure (and hence the structure of responsibility carried across job hierarchy). However there is no single ideal structure of organization and consequently there can be no single ideal structure of pay. Each firm has a range of needs which are met or partially met by the measures taken by management. We can begin the argument by examining the management styles associated with the needs of the employee/ manager relationships - the so-called psychological contract.Management Styles and the Psychological ContractObviously the management style used in fulfilling the psychological contract reflects the way in which managers in the company expect employees to behave. Some managerial teams expect their employees to simply have what is known as a calculative involvement with the company. They are expected to do what is required by the goal-setters (the management team) and no more. The contract is fulfilled by paying sufficient wages or salaries to motivate the employees to meet the goals set by the managers. Many small family firms operate this management style and there are possibly a great many large companies too. It is convenient to label this type of management view of the organization as goal oriented. In the extreme such managers might perceive only a single goal (profit ratio, market share, etc) without requiring the employees to have any identification or moral involvement with that goal. A totally different conceptual model of the organization allows for the achievement of a whole range of needs24 Personnel Review Vol 4 Number 4 Autumn 1975by the organization. Managers who conceive of their companies in this fashion see the need for balancing the system of needs. Employees (and especially other, junior managers) are perceived as people whose actions should influence the entire organization not just their own department or subsystem of, for example, production control or purchasing or marketing, etc. The view held here is that it is no good to have nine tenths of the companys needs being met and the other tenth ignored. It is a systems approach and is a model which is apparent in the management philosophy of our larger and more progressive industrial companies.Between these two polar models of organization there is obviously scope for many other concepts. A pluralistic model, for example would allow for different constituent parts of the organization to have their own separate goals.The models that managers hold of men as distinct from the goals of the company are described in a massive literature of organizational psychology. It is possible in this area also to establish extreme, polar concepts. One extreme would be the assumption that man is a rational-economic animal. Because of this a manager holding such a view might use McGregors well-known Theory X approach to his subordinate. McGregor1 points out that rational-economic man assumptions imply that man is lazy by nature and is motivated primarily by financial incentives. The employee is seen to need direction and control so that he will work towards the organizations goals. He is seen to be unambitious and reluctant to take responsibility. The assumptions associated with Theory X are, of course, built into the foundations of the Classical organization theories. The employee, in short, is seen to react to his environment.The model of man seen to be at the opposite from the reactive, Theory X man is McGregors Theory Y approach. Assumptions on which Theory Y are based include the fact that most men do not dislike work, they seek a challenge from the work environment and in fact welcome the opportunity to achieve a moral involvement with the organization. Under appropriate conditions the employee, says Theory Y, will seek out responsibility and is capable of imagination, ingenuity and creativity. There have been several attempts to classify the various models of man and organization, a notable example being the typology developed by Etzioni2. For the purpose of this present discussion, however, the simple model constructed by Limerick3 to show the type of management style implied by managements assumptions about men and organization seems appropriate. The model takes the form of the matrix shown in Figure 1 below:Reactive ManSelf-Active ManGoalOrganizationAuthoritarianManagementConsultativeManagementSystemOrganizationPaternalisticManagementParticipativeManagementFigure 1 The Limerick Matrix of Management StylesThe matrix suggests that if management holds Theory X (reactive man) assumptions and sees the organization as being single goal orientated, the style implied is authoritarian. At the other extreme, should the assumptions be of Theory Y nature and the organization be seen as systems orientated, the model implies that the strategy is participative. It must be borne in mind, of course, that this classification represents pure types of organization which probably do not exist as such in practice. It is meant to be a relative model which shows only the extreme assumptions and implied strategies. It is, however, very important to be able to put the problem ofdiffering styles into some perspective.Equitable PaymentThe four styles of management proposed in the model can be considered with special reference to problems of equitable payment. Authoritarian management is typified by the proposals of the Classical management theorists (eg Fayol,Urwick, Gulick). The organization is managed along the universal principles of planning, organizing, motivating and controlling and the structure is pyramidal with great emphasis on line authority. There is rigid specialization and departmentalization. Participation by non-management in meeting the organizations goal is severely restricted.In paternalistic management the systems needs of the organization must be met by those employees who are not seen to be reactive. Thus, for example, some large, sophisticated industrial organizations typically perceive themselves to have systems of needs, the non-managers and even junior management are seen as reactive while the senior management team is often assumed to consist of self-active men. Here the senior managers assume that they have to meet their subordinates needs for them; say by providing preferential pension schemes and welfare benefits and cheap canteens, sometimes with little consultation with the employees involved. A paternalistic organization is also typified by a pyramidal structure and an emphasis on line authority. Paternalism is improved over the authoritarian strategy in that employees are often allowed to present alternatives for action in non-task activities. Many British concerns are run on clearly paternalistic lines. There are several well-known, large organizations (typically the major employers in their respective communities) which adopt a cradle to grave, protective attitude to their employees. In the past such firms tended to discourage trade union representation believing that a company union or association could better meet the needs of their workpeople.In a paternalistic company one would expect the pay level for shop floor and clerical workers to be relatively low, the employees being compensated by superior welfare benefits and greater job security in general. In an authoritarian firm the pay levels in the lower job grades could be expected to be slightly higher (for the same economic and technological conditions) than in the paternalistic company. In fact, however, some of the larger well established paternalistic concerns often have a reputation for paying basic wages and salaries above the norm.A consultative management strategy implies that man is seen as self-active but requires to be directed so that his needs are integrated with the goal of the organization. The managers functions are, as in the authoritarian strategy, to plan, organize, motivate and control but in this case the process is carried out in such a way that maximum autonomy for employees is allowed without endangering the goal of the organization. The strategy implies a pyramidal structure with only a limited recognition of the non-managers right to be heard. Participation is allowed to the extent that employees can present alternatives for action in task activities. The style of management is man-to-man but the strategy is also characterized by the use of joint consultative conferences and the like.Participative management assumes that self-active man will make a responsible contribution to the achievement of the systems needs. The managers function is to act as a monitor of the system needs and to create conditions in which they can be met. This strategy implies a fluid, organic structure and recognizes both formal, line authority and the authority of non-executives as a result of their personal expertise. Group work is encouraged and, in participating, employees are allowed to present and evaluate alternative courses of action.In the consultative and participative strategies, then, employees are encouraged to view the organization as a unitary system. Because of this, one would expect to find the pay of low level jobs being compared, formally, to that of the higher-level jobs. In short, one could expect an approach to an all-company job evaluated pay structure since employees are concerned more with the company as a whole compared with their counterparts in companies managed by the first two strategies outlined above.Participation and PaymentThere appears to be some movement towards greater involvement of all employees in the management of British firms. The mood of the day suggests that authoritarian management is fast becoming unacceptable to employees and that even paternalism is unwelcome.At least one large British corporation has developed work designs which eliminate the need for the traditional foreman.The workers operate in teams which decide, for themselves,on the allocation of work duties, shift rota details, holiday arrangement details and the like. More importantly the workers participate, in the true sense, in writing the teams job description and consequent pay grade. Obviously this type of job design and organizational thinking greatly affects a companys philosophy of work and reward. If the apparent trend towards greater participation continues we can therefore expect to see a greater emphasis on the workers knowledge authority. The managerial style used by a company is clearly important in deciding the most appropriate forms of work analysis and reward. It is obviously wrong for a company which is, say, essentially paternalistic to install pay systems which depend on true participation for their effectiveness. Yet this is not at all unusual.If there really is a strong move towards consultative and participative management styles across British industry what are the implications for payment techniques in the future? Managers usually apply two types of technique - one, job evaluation, to provide a ranking of job value in terms of basic wages or salaries and, two, merit rating (or performance appraisal, or incentive systems) to provide a means of rewarding individual employee effort and achievement.Job evaluation techniques which yield a single, company-wide payment structure would seem to offer promise within participative firms. Two fairly recent ideas fit the specification ideally. Elliott Jaques widely discussed time span of discretion system developed in his famous Glacier Project suggests that all jobs at all levels within a firm can be evaluated and rewarded in terms of a single criterion. That criterion is the responsibility carried by the employee in his job and is measured in terms of the time he has to wait to find if his tasks or decisions have been effective. The longer the time span the greater the responsibility and the higher the reward. In addition Jaques has found that when time span values are plotted against the corresponding felt fair wages or salaries a specific distribution exists. Thus he can analyse all jobs in the company in terms of the time span mechanism and produce a payment structure which relates, on one graph, the pay of the labourer and copy typist gto that for the sales manager and managing director. The time span approach has not so far been widely implemented for job evaluation purposes (although it is a well recognized and valuable approach in other areas such as management development). Is it likely to become more popular? If the trend in management style is towards more participation the answer must surely be no. Because the evaluation criterion (time span) and the pay distribution are so well defined and specified it is extremely difficult to see how employees can participate in its implementation. Employees are forced to accept that the company knows best (paternalism implied) or that the company has the right to enforce the system of its choice (autocracy implied).A second, and superficially similar proposal, comes from Paterson whose decision band technique of job evaluation and payment structure is currently being widely discussed. Patersons sole criterion of job value is the hierarchical level of decision-making required by the job. The higher the decision level (policy-making as against routine, procedural decisions) the greater the responsibility implied and the higher the reward. The decision band method is applied to all jobs in the company and provides a specific shape of payroll distribution. (When wages and salaries for the jobs are plotted on a log scale against their decision levels a straight line should be achieved. Paterson argues that this exponential relationship is a necessity for internal payment equity.) Again, as in Jaques proposals, there appears to be too much predetermination to allow for much employee participation in applying the scheme. However Paterson is much less rigid in his approach and accepts that certain job factors have to be bargained and paid for in addition to the payment levels established by decision band grading. The fact that Patersons method is now in use in several British firms and is about to be applied to all jobs within the Danish civil service implies its acceptability. The method probably will be used considerably in future since, although the decision level framework is inflexible, the analysis of jobs emphasizes the knowledge authority of the employee to a very considerable extent. In short the system puts high value on information and advice for decisionmaking as well as the decision-making itself. It must be said however that, in itself, the decision band approach is unlikely to be widely applied as a job evaluation technique within craft union job families. The great attraction of the method is the provision of a payment structure and evaluation framework which can be used as a valuable guide in bargaining and consultation situations.The conventional methods of job eval