http://www.alternet.org/drugs/147580/are_our_bosses_becoming_meaner/?...
Campaign for America's Future
By Sam Pizzigati
Are Our Bosses Becoming Meaner?
The huge pay gaps between executives and workers enhance the sense of
power bosses feel and cause them to objectify lower level employees.
July 17, 2010
The staggering gap between CEO and worker pay, new research from three
business scholars suggests, has left America's workplaces still more
nasty, brutish, and short.
We have today in academia, after 30 years of rising CEO pay, a vast
scholarly literature on CEO compensation. Much of this vast literature
revolves exaltingly around “pay for performance,” the notion that only
“deserving” CEOs should make $20 or $50 or $100 million a year.
Sreedhari Desai, Arthur Brief, and Jennifer George have other
interests.
These three scholars — from Harvard, the University of Utah, and Rice
University — have been exploring the link between executive pay and
“meanness.”
Last month, at an international conference in Boston, the three
unveiled
what their explorations have unearthed. In the process, they may have
shifted executive pay scholarly research in a sobering new direction,
with much less attention on “performance” and much more on raw naked
power.
We already know, from psychological research, a great deal about
power.
We know, for instance, that environments where some hold far more
power
than others can “cause even normal people without any apparent prior
psychological problems to become brutal and abusive towards those with
low power.”
In other words, as Desai, Brief, and George note in their Boston
presentation, “exaggerated power asymmetry” can make people with power
mean to people without.
Contemporary corporate workplaces, the three researchers continue,
regularly display this “exaggerated power asymmetry.” And that
asymmetry, they argue, is intensifying as pay gaps between CEOs and
their workers have widened.
Desai, Brief, and George believe, simply put, that this greater
intensity is making workplaces mean places. The wider the pay gap
between CEOs and workers, they postulate, the more “the former become
meaner toward the latter.”
How do you test such a proposition? Desai, Brief, and George take two
approaches. To establish that higher CEO pay does indeed result in
meaner executive behavior to workers, they dive into a unique
corporate
database that Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini & Co., a Boston-based
investment
research firm, has been maintaining ever since 1991.
KLD has been tracking how individual corporations go about their
employee relations across a variety of benchmarks, everything from the
dollars in fines and penalties corporations pay for willfully
violating
employee health and safety standards to the percent of profit
corporations share with their workers.
Desai, Brief, and George crunched this KLD data to come up with an
meanness-to-employees rating scale and then matched the resulting
individual corporate ratings with CEO pay numbers from 2007, to see if
they could find any link between CEO pay and corporate meanness.
But the three researchers didn’t stop there. They also configured a
laboratory experiment that had 62 college students playing out games
that simulated workplace executive-worker relationships.
The KLD data and the lab games, in the end, would both generate
findings
that point to the same conclusion. Wide pay gaps between executives
and
workers, sum up Desai, Brief, and George, enhance the sense of power
executives feel and cause them to “objectify lower level employees.”
Or, to put the matter more plainly, “executives with higher income
treat
employees more meanly.”
Desai, Brief, and George have an elegant scholarly label for that
phenomenon: “moral disengagement.” Will their work now “engage” the
rest
of academia in a debate that treats executive pay as much more than a
soulless matter of calibrating pay to “performance”? We should sure
hope so.
Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an
associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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Original poster: Dan Clore
