Vital, Visible And Vicious Essay

Question 4. Explain what the authors of your text wanted to convey with the following words in the subtitle of Chapter 7: “Vital, Visible, and Vicious.” Explain why Compensation plans always generate displeasure among both public and private sector employees.

a. The authors refer vital, viable and vicious in terms of how jurisdiction handles salaries
and benefits. Vital is in reference to maintaining an organizations creditability and individual sustenance. Good management of salaries and benefit programs are vital in order to achieve optimal success within an organization. Again since payroll is a huge part of an organizations budget, handling this would be pretty important. Visible refers to the fact that payroll or agencies, and employee salaries are a matter of public record. People can see how an organization manages its money and compare this to others. Vicious refers to actual or an

imagined inequity among employees inhibits friction within the organization. You may think you have a handle on compensation but individual employees may find the slightest inequity and jump all over that causing tension among the masses. In short compensation is well known, “competence and performance may be hard to judge, pay and benefits are known”.

b.

One reason that compensation plans produce displeasure is because employees often
compare themselves to others. Weather it is with individual in similar type of positions within the agency, other individuals who are not in the same positions in the agency or even in the same department or people who don’t even do the same job, a person will often has the tendency to compare themselves. The point is that as people we all compare ourselves to what others have and if there is any distinction between us and them, someone may become disgruntle. Compensation is a little more prevalent with comparing oneself, well because it’s usually all about money.

Another reason is the remuneration is driven more by political than economic considerations. Politics is more concerned with cost of personnel and compensation programs are used as political pawns. Politics is not fond of raising taxes, adjusting budgets, cutting off services etc. in order to increase pay wages. Politics affects compensation more than objective merit which does not inspire confidence in compensation

policies.

Lastly, while not true for the most part, tax payers (public perception) believe that individuals in public service are overpaid and underworked. One would say this is true is they waited in a social security or DMV office for 4 hours, however those individuals on the lower end of civil service are usually do not receive comparable salaries. While this may not be true for that senator or mayor that makes six figures and works less than 40 hours a week from a desk, the average GS2 usually makes out a little better than minimum wage. So, public beliefs have the potential to fuel displeasure with compensation plans among both public and private sector employees.