Pay Transparency – Is it Really a Spectrum or Just a Series of Options?

Editor's Note: Today's post comes to us courtesy of guest contributor Joe Thompson.

I was reading an article recently on applying the theory of job embeddedness to retention.  In a David Letterman-esque Brush with Greatness moment, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the theory was from the same Georgetown University professor who taught my Change Management Advanced Practitioner cohort, Brooks Holtom. 

But, my tenuous connection to someone “famous” is not my subject today. 

The thing that motivated this post was an illustration later in the article, displaying the following “Pay Transparency Spectrum.” (Click on image to see full-size.)

The illustration felt wrong to me, but it took me a moment to figure out why. 

The answer lay in something I recalled from taking my WorldatWork T3 course, Quantitative Methods, on the difference between nominal and ordinal scales. 

In a nutshell, nominal scales are used to depict data with labels but without quantifiable values.  A good example of nominal data would be a scale associated with a question, “What is your hair color?”  We could visualize a listing of possible colors brown, red, blond, black, and so forth.  The key is that the order of the hair colors is not relevant or significant; it is nominal data.

An ordinal scale is different.  In an ordinal scale, the order in which data is shown is important and significant.  A common example can be found in the typical Likert scales.  As another example, I recently visited someone in a hospital and periodically they were asked to respond to a Wong-Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale. 

What struck me about the “Pay Transparency Spectrum” was that it seemed to suggest that pay options are ordinal options.   Mentally, when we see options displayed like this, we tend to see the options as if they are on a Likert scale where the left side is, well, sinister.  From days of antiquity, we’ve been conditioned to see the left side as the sinister side (as anyone whose had prescription lenses can tell you from the O.S. abbreviation).

So, when shown like this, the implicit message is that if you’re doing well, you’re operating your pay program on the far righthand side.  Anyone who has told an employee, “You’re doing a great job and doing everything we expect of you, so congratulations, you’re a ‘3’” knows that anything less than the far righthand side is seen as poor, by comparison.  That’s just human nature.

But are pay transparency options ordinal options?

I think that pay transparency options are actually nominal options about how you can choose to design your compensation program.  To my eye, there is no implied left/right, sinister/dexterous, bad/good comparison between pay transparency options.  In this regard, I would lump options for pay transparency options as nominal data in the same way as I would options for base pay structures, options of short-term incentives, etc.  They are just options that I think are like those hair color options I referenced earlier.  Would we suggest that people’s hair color would be displayed on a Likert-like spectrum where bald heads were on the far left and red hair was on the far right?

But, maybe I’m wrong and need to be calibrated.  So, please, tell me what you think.

Joe Thompson, CCP, CCMP, is currently employed as a Human Capital Strategic Consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton where he assists clients with a wide range of human capital challenges.  He has delivered human capital solutions across the talent management lifecycle including recruitment, job analysis, hiring, compensation and incentives, workforce planning, HR policy, attrition, performance management, change management, cyber human capital, and human capital program design, implementation, and evaluation.  Joe has worked in the area of compensation for 10 years and, prior to Booz Allen, he has worked in the U.S. Intelligence Community and in the U.S. Navy.

Image source: https://www.coroflot.com/gleiberkid/Spinning-Glass-Pyramid

Comments

[Chris Dobyns]

What? You mean the ophthamalic abbreviation O.S. doesn't actually stand for Obviously Sinister? Another misconception upended.

In some now downstream projects we had actually given weight to this left/right preconceived interpretation and toyed with some ideas to counter that human factors hard-wiring. The one idea we came up with didn't get much past the drawing board stage (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XXZHcgx05cM6sFlsi3t-PlR_H3RNXNex/view?usp=sharing), but we initially thought it had promise.

Like you, maybe it just needed to be recalibrated - but differently.

[E. James (Jim) Brennan]

Different cultures where the writing goes not from left to right but down/up or right to left should have different cognitive behavioral responses, if you are correct ... as I suspect.

N.B. (Latin for "Note Bene" = "please note")
Those who studied Latin or other Romance languages should recognize the root words "dexter" = right and "sinister" = left. Any comparative value judgement associations developed later. Words do shape our thoughts.