Question

Chapter 11 1. Merit increases are increases in wages given to an employee to reward good performance. Unions often oppose merit increases because they believe there is a lack of objective criteria for awarding increases, and this allows favoritism to enter into the merit increase. What impact does this have on motivation? 2. If you won $50 million playing the lottery this weekend, would you continue to work — perhaps not in your current job, but in another job? Why? What does this say about employees’ motivation in the workplace? Chapter 12 1. Edwin Lawler, Management Professor at the University of Southern California, states, “Teams are the Ferraris of work design. They’re high performance but high maintenance and expensive.” Do you agree? Why or why not? 2. You have likely worked as part of a team on a school project or assignment, and it is just as likely that at least one member of the team did not do his/her share of the work. How should a professor equitably grade a team project? Should s/he assign one grade for the team’s project, individual grades for each teammate’s contribution, or some other way?

Answer 1

Answering the first question as HOMEWORKLIB Guidelines:

1. In my views, merit increases or performance based pay is the best compensation system. In this compensation system, the pay is divided into 2 attributes – fixed pay and variable pay. Fixed pay is the base pay and variable pay is the pay which is given to an employee, based on his performance in a financial year. This variable pay component is decided based on the performance appraisal of the employee. Initially companies had hesitation about adopting this compensation system as the results of performance appraisal can be biased. To counter this, the companies are adopting balanced scorecard in the performance appraisal system. The BSC helps in evaluating the employee’s performance on 4 perspectives. This gives a comprehensive perspective of the employee’s performance and allotting variable pay component to the employee becomes easy.

When the system is made fair and transparent, employees have no objection with this kind of compensation system. Instead they get motivated to work hard, so as to perform well and get eligible for variable pay.