企业高管薪酬支付水平的不合理性效用评估——经验、数据检验与启示

The Utility Evaluation of the Irrationality of CEOs' Compensation Paying——Experience,Data Test and Implication

组织CEO的薪酬水平一直是社会关注的焦点,主要观点是薪酬水平太高,不符合薪酬分配结构和缺乏合理性依据。调查发现,CEO们利用其自身的权力可以增加薪酬收入和津贴水平,这是缺乏合理性的主要基点。本文将CEO薪酬水平不合理性分为两种,即支付过度和支付不足,而这两种情况都会产生负效用,最大的负效用是引起组织基层管理人员的离职行为。由于组织关注的重点在于绩效,董事会往往偏向于向CEO支付高薪酬以换来企业的高绩效,而通过数据验证后,本文认为,不管是CEO薪酬支付过度还是支付不足,都在一定程度上降低了组织的绩效,并且附带产生一些潜在"负效用"。

The compensation of CEOs always is the focus of the society. The main viewpoints are that the salary level is too high, and the salary distribution structure is irrational. According to our survey, the CEOs may use their power to enhance their salary level and benefits. And this situation has become the main argument for the irrationality. The traditional salary system has only focused the cost reduction of the firm and it always wants to improve the sales by giving more compensation to the CEOs. However, this behavior may cause more core employees to leave the firm and decrease the employees＇ utility sharply. In a firm, the CEO always decides the wage （salary） system. For example, the low-position employees＇ wage level would always, be affected by the CEO＇s idea. After that, more and more inequality would happen and the result of this is that cohesive force in the firm would be much weaker. In the modern marketeconomy, the firms must pay more attentions to the employees＇ satisfactions about the salary system. The salary satisfactions of employee mainly be decided by the following two factors： the management methods and the management philosophy. The salary system is one of the most important factors which affect the employees＇ loyalty. There are two factors in salary system which can affect the employees＇ loyalty： the equity of the salary system and the level of the salary system. In this article we analyze the overpaid and underpaid of CEOs＇ salary in order to know the special effects on employees which caused by CEOs payment. Based on the results of data analysis, we can know that the characters of CEOs al- so become an important .factor which affects the employees＇satisfaction on the salary system. The salary system of a special firm has become one of the most important factors which support the firm development. The employees can be encouraged by the scientific salary system. As a result of this, the performance of employees can improve quickly and highly. For example, one who want leave the company because of the inequity could continue be loyalty to the company. The assisting institution system of human resource management（ performance management,job analysis, etc）can give a important effect to the salary system. When evaluating investment and divestiture proposals, CEOs should be better able to prudently bear risk if they have access to a heavy flow of ＇ real-time＇ information about industry developments, and have the expertise to make sense of that information and synthesize appropriate strategies. Owing to bounded rationality, these requirements would appear to be moreimportant for the CEOs of focused firms. Based on this logic, and consistent with the results reported here, we might expect focused firms to exhibit less risk avoidance behavior than the diversified firms. In this study we propose that norms of fairness are salient to top decision makers and show that over or underpayment of the CEO cascades down to lower organizational levels. Moreover, it appears that CEOs use their own power to increase not only their own salaries, but also those of their subordinates. One implication of such a process may be that the overpayment of a top executive has higher costs than have previously been realized. The evidence we found suggests that CEOs serve as a key referent for employees in determining whether their own situation is fair, and this influences their reactions to their own compensation. More specifically, we find that when lowerlevel managers are underpaid relative to the CEO--that is to say, underpaid more than the CEO or overpaid less-- they are more likely to leave the organization. Results obtained from testing our hypotheses on a sample of more than 120 firms over a five-year period demonstrates the importance of considering fairness in the setting of CEO pay. Implications for the design of executive compensation packages are discussed. We divide the irrationality into two sections ： overpaid and underpaid. Both of them can produce the negative effects and the biggest negative effect is that the irrationality can lead to the employee＇s quit behavior. Because the firms always focus on the performance, so they prefer to provide the higher compensation to the CEO in order to gain the higher performance. After the data tested, the irrationality of the CEOs＇ compensation can reduce the firmperformance, and also produce the potential negative effects.