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Performance Related Pay Schemes

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Submitted By lucas88
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Most upper-management and sales force personnel, as well as workers in many other jobs, are paid based on individual performance related pay [PRP], which is widely perceived as motivating effort and enhancing productivity relative to non-contingent pay schemes. Some examples of PRP come in the form of sales or target based commission. Car salesmen or production line workers, for example, may be paid in this way.
What better way to drive people to work harder, be more focused, and more efficiently, one may ask, other than to offer them a special dangling carrot: more money for hitting specific company targets? The idea may seem perfect and intuitive. Managers want their employees to pull out stops on project X, for example. Employees, confident of their own abilities to reach if not surpass those goals, start banking on the carrot.
In practice, however, the process of connecting pay to performance may be far trickier that it at first appears, according to HBS professor Michael Beer and Nancy Katz in 2003 “Do Incentives Work? The Perception of A Worldwide Sample of Senior Executives." Human Resource Planning 26, no. 3 (2003): 30–44. Indeed, David Marsden in 2009 considers there a need to address the paradox of the persistent use of PRP in the face of evidence that they fail to motivate. Even with these arguments, it is hard to deny that organisations still use the incentive as a prime mechanism for control and coordination.
Economic Contribution of PAT
Economists have developed the most coherent theory of incentives; the principal-agent theory [PAT]. In economics and political science, this is the problem of motivating the agent [worker] to act in the interest of the principal [firm]. It can be analysed as a special case of the moral hazard problem arising as a consequence of information asymmetry.
Under the PAT, when effort or the workers’ input is unobservable

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