Decision-Making Effects on Compensation Surveys: Implications for Market Wages

Compensation specialists made two survey-sample decisions in a simulated wage survey. Policy-capturing analyses indicated that most specialists relied extensively on two of the available cues and consistently applied that policy across judgments. They were not able to accurately estimate their own d...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of applied psychology 1992-10, Vol.77 (5), p.588-597
Main Authors: Viswesvaran, Chockalingam, Barrick, Murray R
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Business and Industrial Personnel
Business Organizations
Compensation
Cues
Decision Making
Determinants
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Market
Market rates
Occupational psychology
Organization and management. Professional relation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Salaries
Sampling (Experimental)
Surveys
Wages
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Compensation specialists made two survey-sample decisions in a simulated wage survey. Policy-capturing analyses indicated that most specialists relied extensively on two of the available cues and consistently applied that policy across judgments. They were not able to accurately estimate their own decision-making policies, as demonstrated by the fact that rationally generated assessments of cue importance were significantly different from their actual policies. Finally, meta-analyses demonstrated that the variation in policies across decision makers could not be attributed to statistical artifacts or any moderators (e.g., salary-survey experience or industry) associated with the demographic data. Thus, different compensation specialists are likely to select a different sample of employers even for the same wage survey. Implications for the relevance of market wages obtained from surveys are discussed.
ISSN:0021-9010
1939-1854
DOI:10.1037/0021-9010.77.5.588