One example that comes to my mind regards a good friend of mine who made an interesting choice a few months ago, as she decided to leave her sales job just a few weeks before receiving a massive year-end bonus. At first, I was confused. From the outside, she was doing everything right, she had a solid performance, impressive numbers, and a good relationship with her clients. But after speaking to her, I realized it was almost entirely about how compensation was managed at her organization.
Despite the bonus being a team-wide goal, not everyone on the team was doing their part. My friend felt that she was doing all the heavy lifting, compared to others who she believed were just coasting through, and yet were still being given the same advantages. Through our lessons from this week, I beleive that this is a classic model of distributive fairness — or in her case, lack thereof. The outcomes (bonus) do not correspond with her individual inputs (effort and performance), which brings us straight to equity theory.
She experienced what the lessons refer to as negative inequity, or when someone feels that their input/output is worse than that of their peers. Instead of pushing through these feelings and suffering in a sense, hoping things would get better, she left. And I’ve came to see this as her way of taking control and finding a job that would value her as an individual contributor.
This really made it clear to me that compensation is not just about the money, it’s about feeling also being valued. Factors like internal equity, pay levels, and how bonuses are determined can really affect motivation. Despite a big paycheck, most people want to feel as if they’re being treated fairly.
At the end of the day, if someone’s not being compensated for how they perform, I think it is the right goal to start searching for other options out there that prove to value you more for you’re efforts.