Pay transparency might improve employee behavior

NEW HAVEN — Most American workers don’t need to be told that income is inequitable.

The gender pay gap — women made about 80.5 cents to ever dollar a man made in 2016, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research — and the higher rate many CEOs make compared to workers — an estimated 270.5 times more in 2016, according to the Economic Policy Institute — are common knowledge, or at the very least intuited, by the average worker.

Even when workplace pay is not equal, however, being honest about it could lead to a better outcome, an assistant professor at Southern Connecticut State University said.

In a study published last week in Organizational Management Journal, SCSU Assistant Professor Alison Wall and co-authors Shelly Marasi and Rebecca Bennett found a correlation between employees who don’t feel pay at their workplace is transparent and employees who withhold effort or steal and destroy property.

Wall and the other researchers polled 611 individuals through a selfselecting polling service offered by Amazon about their perceptions on pay openness at work and their own behavior and attitudes. She said they received results from a variety of industries and levels of organization, but respondents were united in not working in management positions.

Of the respondents, 73 percent were not union employees.

“In a union environment, people are more likely and capable to know their pay,” Wall said. “Most were with their employers between one and five years.”

Using a scale to measure workplace deviancy developed by Bennett, respondents rated how often they did things such as: put little effort into work or said something rude at work. This was done on a scale of zero to six.

The researchers concluded that employees who did not believe pay was transparent at work also engaged in workplace deviancy. Conversely, when employees believed pay at work was communicated clearly, they were more likely to engage in “citizenship acts,” such as helping an overburdened co-worker with a project.

Wall said the research supports a movement within the organizational management field toward pay transparency.

“The assumption is if you look at the fairness of outcomes, even if the distributions aren’t fair, having access to and knowing that information makes us less likely to engage in negative behaviors,” she said. “Because then, people make assumptions that it’s worse than it is.”

Wall, who has a background in organizational behavior and human resources management, said organizations are “shifting more to valuing what individuals bring to the organization.”

She said that, as Millennials get situated in the workplace, they bring an internet age culture where transparency might be expected.

“Millennials put their lives out there, so the organization should mimic that behavior,” she said.