The Psychology Archives invites you to the first installment of the spring colloquium series on Thursday, March 4th from 3:00 – 4:30 pm in Room 310 of the Student Union at the University of Akron. Dr. Cristina G. Banks will present on “Crossing Disciplines and Innovating in Psychology: Making Something New from the Familiar”. 

Dr. Banks holds a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Minnesota (1979) and a BA in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley (1974). She is President and Founder of Lamorinda Consulting LLC, an organizational consulting firm specializing in employment law. She specializes in the areas of organizational strategy, performance improvement, human resource strategy, organizational and personnel assessment, and wage and hour laws. She is a nationally recognized expert in the Fair Labor Standards Act and California wage and hour laws. She serves as an expert witness in employment class action cases. She recently won APA’s Presidential Citation Innovation Award for her work in job analysis.

Steve Kerr, former chief learning officer for General Electric and Goldman Sachs, has written a short book on Reward Systems: Does Yours Measure Up? The book is in the Harvard Business Press Memo to the CEO series. However, any employee at any level can learn valuable lessons from the enjoyable book.

I find a lot of short, popular books like this — it clocks in at less than 136 pages — are relatively short on content. Many can be summarized in a couple of pages or paragraphs. But not this book by Steve Kerr. Kerr has had a long career in acadame and industry; he is also an excellent story teller. As a result, the book provides a wealth of information on what goes wrong, and what can go right, with reward and compensation systems.

The book contains a number of checklists and guiding principles. The major organizational principles are:

1. Define performance in actionable terms
2. Measure the right things
3. Reward the right things

This may sound simple. Of course, the devil is in the details. The book provides a great deal of information on how you can attempt to follow the three principles.

The following news item came via the IPAT listserv. It deals with the high failure rate on the recent New York Fire Department Promotional Exam.

According to the New York Post, “It was a massive medical failure for hundreds of FDNY medics who hoped to get promoted, as a measly eight out of 721 city Emergency Medical Service workers passed the most recent lieutenant exam. The 1.1 percent pass rate for the 2008 test is about 38 percentage points lower than the last time the exam was given, in 2004, when 1,044 medics took the test and 409, or 39 percent, passed, The Post has learned.”

What I found most interesting about this case was the possibility that the results were a function of the pay schedules or compensation system. Again according to the New York Post, “Lieutenant pay starts at $48,900 annually, according to the city’s exam notice. Top paramedics can expect a base salary of $59,000, and several thousand dollars more in meal money, overtime and shift-differential pay.” In addition, you might expect that the paramedics would start at the bottom of the Lieutenant list when it came to the application of seniority in matters like selecting shifts or locations.

I have encountered similar situations. In such a case, there is relatively little motivation for anyone to study for the exam or desire a promotion. If the article is correct, then there would appear to be a compensation problem driving the testing results.

Two topics that attract my interest are 1) Emotional Labor and 2) the Nature of Service to the Public. Mary Guy, Meredith Newman, and Sharon Mastracci explore both topics in a book titled Emotional Labor: Putting the Service in Public Service.

The positives of the book:

• The authors take a scientific approach to the topic
• A great deal of data and information are presented
• The concept of emotional labor is approached from a number of angles and viewpoints
• The concept of service is approached from a number of angles and viewpoints
• For those involved in Human Resources in the Public Sector, this is a very good introduction and also in-depth look at the topic
• A number of new ideas are presented, which can lead to a lot of discussion

The negatives:

• It reads like a technical report or dissertation turned into a book
• The authors have a very strongly defined political point of view, which is fine in a book, but that leads to skipping over a lot of counter arguments and research
• Despite seeming to be an exhaustive look, the book skips over a lot of research on emotional labor. In truth, the book has more to do with public service than emotional labor as defined in the psychological literature.
• Many of the authors’ arguments and viewpoints concerning pay come out of the comparable worth movement of the late 1970s, early 1980s. Yet, they do not discuss the relevant literature or counter arguments. In places, the book seems very dated despite having a 2008 copyright.

Overall, if you are involved in human resources in the public sector or are a student involved in public administration or public service, you should buy and hold onto this book. It provides an excellent overview of a number of topics. There are not enough books dealing with the human resource aspects of service jobs, and this book does an excellent job of introducing the issues and problem areas involves in studying, analyzing, and paying for public service jobs.

As I write this, Obama has signed the so-called Ledbetter or Equal Pay Bill. For organizations, this law can represent a major challenge. Many organizations do not retain the records or the documentation that would allow them to respond to pay discrimination suits filed years after the act. Although there are some who would argue for the benefit of no records, I believe that the only real solution is more and better documentation. Companies should collect and maintain information on the rationale for their pay decisions, including those at initial hire.

In addition, this does work against the movement in recent years to broader pay bands with wider managerial discretion.  If managerial discretion is going to be allowed, the reasons for decisions should be recorded and justified. The other alternative is to move back to greater use of centralized pay decision mechanisms.