| > These are two common scenarios I see: There is a 3rd scenario that I've occasionally seen: Two employees with the same title on the same team. Employee One is unhappy because they are paid 10% less than Employee Two, despite same experience and title. Employee Two ALSO unhappy because in practice they do 50% more work than Employee One for 10% more pay. I still don't see the parent's connection of transparency to lower pay, but there is a rich scientific literature on the concept of "Comparison is the thief of joy" -- I hypothesize that turnover rates might positively correlate with transparency because they could promote intra-team competitive feelings. The exception would be if there were a rigid structure that you know going in, similar to how e.g. government pay scales work. Since you know going in that the only input is seniority, you won't care that exceptional work is not rewarded because that was made clear from the get-go, and if that would have bothered you you wouldn't have accepted the offer in the first place. The natural counterargument to that is that if the only input to compensation is seniority, then there is reduced incentivization for performing "above and beyond", possibly cultivating a culture of mediocrity. It also would promote pay equity, however, since e.g. employees' implicit biases and social conditioning would not come into play under subjective evaluations. |