Power Play, Because of Pay? How Pay Transparency Affects Counterproductive Work Behaviors

ABSTRACT: With social comparison theory as our theoretical foundation, how employees target one another based on the presentation of information that they see and evaluate, we explain how process pay transparency and outcome pay transparency affect the probability of counterproductive work behaviors from employees toward individuals (CWB-I) and organizations (CWB-O). We utilize field study data courtesy of Mendeley (“Pay Communication, Justice and Affect: The Asymmetric Effects of Process and Outcome Pay Transparency on Counterproductive Workplace Behavior,” 2020) and select methods from SimanTov-Nachlieli and Bamberger (2021, 235) using SmartPLS. While three hypotheses failed to produce significant results, and the only hypothesis that produced significant results was not supported (process pay transparency negatively, not positively, related to counterproductive work behaviors directed at the organization), our final bootstrapped SEM fit our data for our saturated model (SRMR = 0.046 < 0.08, NFI = 0.915 > 0.9). Implications are discussed. KEYWORDS: social comparison, pay communication, pay transparency, process pay transparency, outcome pay transparency, counterproductive work behaviors (toward organization and individuals)