Employee Compensation: Research and Practice

[Excerpt] An organization has the potential to remain viable only so long as its members choose to participate and engage in necessary role behaviors (March & Simon, 1958; Katz & Kahn, 1966). To elicit these contributions, an organization must provide inducements that are of value to its members. This exchange or transaction process is at the core of the employment relationship and can be viewed as a type of contract, explicit or implicit, that imposes reciprocal obligations on the parties (Barnard, 1936; Simon, 1951; Williamson, 1975; Rousseau, 1990). At the heart of that exchange are decisions by employers and employees regarding compensation

Models of motivation in software engineering

Motivation in software engineering is recognized as a key success factor for software projects, but although there are many papers written about motivation in software engineering, the field lacks a comprehensive overview of the area. In particular, several models of motivation have been proposed, but they either rely heavily on one particular model (the job characteristics model), or are quite disparate and difficult to combine. Using the results from our previous systematic literature review (SLR), we constructed a new model of motivation in software engineering. We then compared this new model with existing models and refined it based on this comparison. This paper summarises the SLR results, presents the important existing models found in the literature and explains the development of our new model of motivation in software engineering

Modifying risk perceptions of Japanese university students using a culturally compatible mode of instruction

Japanese university students who come to the United States present a particular challenge to universities to teach them about their risks to personal property. The usual method of delivering this message, a lecture during the orientation period, may not be the most effective way of presenting the information due to their limitations in understanding English. It was hypothesized that a manga, or comic book, would be an effective and culturally compatible mode of instruction.;A manga was developed and was tested on a group of incoming Japanese freshmen. Forty students (12 females, 28 males) were divided into two groups. One group received instruction through a lecture; the other received the manga. An instrument to test the effectiveness was also developed. Named the Safe Practices on American College Campuses Inventory (SPACCI), it was administered to both groups before and immediately after their respective periods of instruction. It was administered to each group again three months later to determine what the students retained.;Analyses of variations were done on the data and revealed that the manga group scored significantly higher (p \u3c .05) on the inventory than the lecture group, indicating the effectiveness of this method for the short term. In addition, analyses revealed that there was no significant difference between the answers of male and female students, nor between students from rural and urban areas. Although the manga group initially scored higher than the lecture group, they did not retain the information any better after three months.;The data suggests that a comic book is an effective method of instructing Japanese university students during their orientation period about behaviors that will safeguard their personal property

Academic Entrepreneurship: A Comparison of U.S. and Japanese Promotion of Information Technology and Computer Science

Manufacturing hardware is increasingly a commodity product with low margins. The reason for the diminished value of hardware is that more and more of the value in high-tech products is contributed by software meeting user needs, through enabling new functionalities and services. Those firms better able to create and use software advances, improve their competitive outcomes. Japanese high-tech firms have been slow to recognize and act on the growing importance of software and have suffered competitively. The reasons are many. It is widely recognized that human capital is a critical component of software innovation and thus would be central to any explanation of Japanese firms’ weakness in software. For this reason, I focus on the role of university engineering education in IT, comparing the U.S. and Japan. My analysis documents the leadership role played by U.S. universities and in particular, the academic entrepreneurship demonstrated by leading computer science departments. The contrasts with leading Japanese universities, the University of Tokyo in particular, are striking. On the Japanese side, they include a slowness in recognizing the importance of software and in adopting state of the art curriculum, a failure of MEXT to regulate the way in which universities implemented their mandate to develop information technology, an egregious sabotaging of the new information technology departments by university administrators, and a reluctance of leading firms to hire computer science graduates. Finally, centralized faculty decision making allowed engineering faculty in other departments to resist changing student quotas (teiin) in favor of the new discipline. Taken together, these factors inhibited the development of computer science as a distinctive discipline and put a break on any faculty entrepreneurs seeking to promote the new discipline. By contrast, I will show how institutional practices in the U.S. acted to promote academic entrepreneurship enhancing the growth of the new discipline

Entrepreneurial Ventures and the Developmental State: Lessons from the Advanced Economies

A basic intellectual challenge for those concerned with the poverty of nations is to come to grips with the nature and causes of the wealth of the world?s wealthier nations. One might then be in a position to inform the poorer nations how they might achieve similar outcomes. This paper is organized around what I call ?the theory of innovative enterprise?, a perspective derived from the historical and comparative study of the development of the advanced economies. The theory of innovative enterprise provides the essential analytical link between entrepreneurship and development. Section 2 offers, as a point of departure, a contrast between entrepreneurship in rich and poor nations. Section 3 outlines the theory of the innovating firm in which entrepreneurship has a role to play. Section 4 identifies the roles of entrepreneurship in new firm formation in terms of the types of strategy, organization, and finance that innovation requires, and emphasizes the ?disappearance? of entrepreneurship with the growth of the firm. In Section 5 I argue that, in the advanced economies, successful entrepreneurship in knowledge intensive industries has depended heavily upon a combination of business allocation of resources to innovative investment strategies, and government investment in the knowledge base, state sponsored protection of markets and intellectual property rights, and state subsidies to support these business strategies. One cannot understand national economic development without understanding the role of the developmental state. At the same time, the specific agenda and ultimate success of the developmental state cannot be understood in abstraction from the dynamics of innovative enterprise. It is through the interaction of the innovative enterprise and the developmental state that entrepreneurial activity inserts itself into the economic system to contribute to the process of economic development.entrepreneurship, innovative enterprise, developmental state

Motivation and Satisfaction of Software Engineers

Context: The proper management of people can help software organisations to achieve higher levels of success. However, the limited attention paid to the appropriate use of theories to underpin the research in this area leaves it unclear how to deal with human aspects of software engineers, such as motivation and satisfaction. Objectives: This article aims to expose what drives the motivation and satisfaction of software engineers at work. Methods: A multiple case study was conducted at four software organisations in Brazil. For 11 months, data was collected using semi-structured interviews, diary studies, and document analyses. Results: The Theory of Motivation and Satisfaction of Software Engineers (TMS-SE), presented in this article, combines elements from well established theories with new findings, and translates them into the software engineering context. Conclusion: The TMS-SE advances the understanding of people management in the software engineering field and presents a strong conceptual framework for future investigations in this area

Pay, Performance, and Participation

Our chapter identifies key dimensions on which organizations make employee compensation decisions and examines the emerging research evidence on the consequences of such decisions for attitudes, behaviors, and organization performance. We provide some general suggestions that may prove helpful in future research. First, there is increased recognition that pay decisions take place in the context of implicit or explicit contracts between employees and specific organizations. As a result, we encourage researchers to continue to give greater attention to the role of organization differences in compensation. Second, because pay is multidimensional, attention should not be restricted to organization differences in pay level. Organization differences in benefits, structure, and means of recognizing individual employees contributions also warrant attention. As an example of how the focus can be expanded, we provide new empirical evidence on organization differences in the market sensitivity of pay structures. Third, we note that the success of pay programs depends not only on decisions about pay per se, but also the process used in making communicating, and administering such decisions. More broadly, the influence of contextual factors, such as the nature of other employee relations practices (e.g., staffmg, development, employment security), needs to be considered to a greater extent in compensation research. In addition to these broad suggestions, we provide specific ideas on future research directions throughout the chapter

Information Technology in The Learning Economy -Challenges for Developing Countries

This paper inquires how the concept of the "learning economy" can be applied to the requirements of developing countries. The main purpose is to develop an analytical framework to better understand how learning and capability formation can foster industrial upgrading. Special emphasis is given to te spread of information technology (IT). We inquire under what conditions developing countries can use this set of generic technologies to improve their learning capabilities. We argue that information technology should not be regarded as a potential substitute for human skills and tacit knowledge. Instead, its main role should be to support the formation and use of tacit knowledge. In the paper we compare two stylised models of the learning economy, the Japanese versus the American model. The Japanese model is explicit in its promotion and exploitation of tacit knowledge, while the American model is driven by a permanent urge to reduce the importance of tacit knowledge and to transform it into information - that is into explicit, 4 well structured and codified knowledge. We show that each of these models has peculiar strengths and weaknesses. Developing countries need to develop their own hybrid forms of institutions that combine the advantages of both models in a way that is appropriate to their idiosyncratic needs and capabilities.information technology; learning; learning economy; knowledge; capabilities; networks; developing countries; economic development; industrial upgrading

Designing and Operating Safe and Secure Transit Systems: Assessing Current Practices in the United States and Abroad, MTI Report 04-05

Public transit systems around the world have for decades served as a principal venue for terrorist acts. Today, transit security is widely viewed as an important public policy issue and is a high priority at most large transit systems and at smaller systems operating in large metropolitan areas. Research on transit security in the United States has mushroomed since 9/11; this study is part of that new wave of research. This study contributes to our understanding of transit security by (1) reviewing and synthesizing nearly all previously published research on transit terrorism; (2) conducting detailed case studies of transit systems in London, Madrid, New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C.; (3) interviewing federal officials here in the United States responsible for overseeing transit security and transit industry representatives both here and abroad to learn about efforts to coordinate and finance transit security planning; and (4) surveying 113 of the largest transit operators in the United States. Our major findings include: (1) the threat of transit terrorism is probably not universal—most major attacks in the developed world have been on the largest systems in the largest cities; (2) this asymmetry of risk does not square with fiscal politics that seek to spread security funding among many jurisdictions; (3) transit managers are struggling to balance the costs and (uncertain) benefits of increased security against the costs and (certain) benefits of attracting passengers; (4) coordination and cooperation between security and transit agencies is improving, but far from complete; (5) enlisting passengers in surveillance has benefits, but fearful passengers may stop using public transit; (6) the role of crime prevention through environmental design in security planning is waxing; and (7) given the uncertain effectiveness of antitransit terrorism efforts, the most tangible benefits of increased attention to and spending on transit security may be a reduction in transit-related person and property crimes