Arguing that pay is a promising and largely untapped source of competitive advantage, he shows how to use pay to reinforce behavior that best serves a company’s business strategy – and thereby improve performance and profitability.
Drawing on his thirty years of experience as a researcher and consultant on compensation and organizational effectiveness, Lawler reveals how pay strategies that draw a clear connection between pay and performance can support an organization’s strategic objectives by communicating unmistakably what the organization values most highly. He examines a wide range of performance-based pay practices – from piecework incentive systems to merit pay and skill-based pay – and demonstrates how pay systems can be tailored to fit a variety of business strategies and management styles. And he offers criteria for determining which pay strategies are most likely to win acceptance and deliver performance improvements in any given organization.
Lawler explores both traditional and non-traditional pay strategies, with special emphasis on how to design pay systems that support participatory management and other innovative management practices.