中文3600字原文：外文出处International Foundation News外文作者Frank L.GiancolaA Framework for Understanding New Concepts in CompensationmanagementOver the past 25 years, several major new concepts in compensation management have reflected overly ambitious goals . Experts have disagreed about their basic premises, and the business world has had trouble accepting them. Examining the history of three such concepts-skill-based pay, broadbanding and total rewards -is worthwhile , for it reveals the challenges they present and helps define a pattern for how professionals deal with these and other new ideas in the profession . Skill -Based PayThe skill -based approach for determining base pay is based on an employee’s skills, rather than his or her current job. Leading thinkers in compensation management have supported this approach since the 1980s. According to compensation experts Patricia Zingheim and Jay Schuster it is the “next great thing in pay and benefits”. In an interview Edward Lawler called it “the compensation system of the future.”This approach shifts the focal point from the job to the person, with the goals of providing employees with greater incentives to improve skills and competencies and giving management a more versatile workforce. Generally, employees are paid to acquire higher skills in their own field or lateral ones in related fields. From a systems standpoint, job descriptions, job evaluation plans and job-based salary surveys are replaced by skill profiles, skill evaluation plans and skill-based salary surveys.The disappearance of the traditional job provides the primary rationale for this change. Today，employees are said to have variable and unstable work assignments , with roles that cannot be assigned a valid pay rate in traditional job evaluation plans . Contentious TenetsThe main tenets of skill-based pay (SBP) conflict with mainstream business thinking. The first tenet is that pay should be based only on skills, taking the value of an employee’s work to an organization out of the pay equation. In effect, SBP advocates are asking compensation professionals to set the same pay rate for employees, based on their skills, even though they might have substantially different duties and responsibilities and make substantially different contributions to a firm’s success. The omission of something of fundamental value to the firm makes the concept a hard sell with managers and employees. In recent years, compensation experts have affirmed the value of work as an essential part of the pay equation.The second tenet is the notion that pay should be based on how many skills employees have or how many jobs they potentially can do , not on the job they currently hold . Here again, SBP advocates make what many firms consider an unreasonable request. They introduce a controversial pay for potential concept that directly contradicts the pay for performance concept compensation professionals have diligently strived to establish. In recent years, emphasis has been on what employees actually accomplish on the job, rather than on static concepts relating to who they are, such as their management potential or length of service. Also, by asking firms to pay employees for a job that they might perform in the future, SBP is a practice few firms could afford. With these core beliefs, SBP has experienced an uphill battle for acceptance as the primary means to determine base pay.Questionable AssumptionThe SBP concept rests on a questionable assumption -that a job does not reflect the skills of the person required to do it. That makes job evaluation plans an inappropriate method for evaluating skills and setting pay rates. According to SBP advocates, skills must be valued by using market-based skill surveys. They overlook the fact that most point-factor job evaluation plans award the bulk of their points for the possession and application of knowledge, skills and abilities. On this point, Lawler has stated ,“In many cases , this ( skill-based pay ) will not produce dramatically different pay rates than are produced by paying for the nature of the job . After all, the skills that people have usually match reasonably well the jobs that they are doing.”Also overlooked is the fact that many occupations (e.g., accountant, electrician and actuary) do reflect the skills required to perform them; when salary surveys are conducted and employees are paid based on occupation titles and job summaries , skill requirements are being valued .Ambiguous DefinitionFew “new” ideas in compensation management represent a complete break from the prior ideas. Although SBP was billed as a new idea in compensation when introduced, it included old compensation practices, such as career ladders and generalist classifications.The result is that today，when companies are surveyed to see if they use SBP practices , those that use old SBP practices are counted among the firms that have signed on to the concept . This gives a false picture about the adoption of this “new”, way of paying employees and contr ibutes to varying descriptions of the concept’s level of acceptance.Competency-Based PayIn the 1990s, competency-based pay was introduced as a type of SBP plan for professional and managerial employees. It calls for base pay to be determined based on competencies instead of duties and responsibilities. Shortly after the concept was introduced, controversy arose as to what constitutes a legitimate competency. Today, there are many alternatives to choose from—core, organizational, behavioral and technical competencies. One compensation expert has asked for a governing body, similar to those in the accounting profession, to help sort out what the termcompetency actually means in the world of employee compensation.Changes in the economy and the nature of work—such as the rise of the contingent workforce and the disappearance of traditional jobs, which were predicted to result in a need for SBP—have not materialized. That and the lack of administrative support systems probably have contributed to the concept’s slow growth. Today, SBP is associated with blue-collar workers in manufacturing industries, which are in decline in the United States, while competency-based pay has had a greater impact on performance management than on base pay.Despite these issues and setbacks, prominent compensation experts continue to support the concept.BroadbandingOne of the most visible concepts in compensation management in the 1990s was broadbanding, which collapses many salary grades and ranges into fewer bands with broader salary spans. Its popularity was attributed in part to the 1990s trend to downsize organizations by reducing the number of hierarchical levels.When broadbanding was introduced, some thought leaders saw it as a new pay program for managing salaries and supporting organizational initiatives, such as eliminating bureaucracy and reducing costs.Others saw it as a “higher order of change” and a new way of managing human resources that would be a catalyst for organizational change and represent much more than a new way to reduce bureaucracy and costs.The concept was loosely defined, and companies were said to have welcomed the opportunity to adapt it to their unique needs. And some were given credit for adopting it, even though one cited plan had 13 bands, with multiple salary ranges within them, making it resemble a traditional salary administration plan.FlexibilityOne constant in the dialogue on broadbanding is that it provides the flexibility to accommodate change and to define job responsibilities more broadly. Proponents have dismissed traditional salary administration systems as being too structured, with too many rules.Execution IssuesEarly experience with broadbanding was not completely positive. Although these systems were supposed to reduce costs, managers had too much discretion to increase salaries within the bands. After several years, salaries had progressed to levels that could not be justified.“Second generation” banded systems gave less freedom for managers to determine salaries. These systems include more bands and specifically define salary ranges within the bands,making them resemble the traditional systems they were supposed to replace.Two compensation textbooks have reserved final judgment on the value of broadbanding. One sees it as a potential reprise of the type of salary administration “flexibility” that gave rise to the traditional plans. These plans were developed to reduce favoritism and inconsistencies that resulted from a lack of structure and controls that exist in broadbanding.Total RewardsIn the past decade, professional associations, major human resource consulting firms and compensation experts have advocated the total rewards approach to the development of a firm’s rewards strategy. Some billed it as more than a passing phase and possibly the greatest breakthrough in compensation since health care plans were combined with pay packages.The approach calls for HR professionals to consider all aspects of the work experience of value to people when developing a strategy to attract, retain and motivate employees .It extends the prior concept of total compensation, which encompassed only pay and benefit programs, and gives form to an idea described in a compensation textbook widely used in the 1970s.Thus, the idea is more novel than radical.In the early 2000s, after the intense competition for talent and the economy of the 1990s had cooled, employers sought ways to reduce costs and needed a strategy that places more emphasis on low-cost rewards and less on costly pay and benefit programs, such as stock options. Total rewards meets that need with its message that learning and development, recognition and other soft-dollar programs are as important as pay and benefits in satisfying employees. In addition, it provides a flexible and broad array of rewards that responds well to globalization, mergers and acquisitions, and other forces that increase workforce diversity.Execution IssuesThe launch of total rewards confirmed the axiom that new compensation programs typically are simple in concept, but complex in execution. When HR practitioners put the concept into practice, they encountered many stumbling blocks. That led two consultants to describe human resource professionals in late 2004 as “feeling confused or sensing chaos regarding total rewards.” A primary cause of the confusion was experts who used different names, definitions and models to describe it. Corrective actions were taken to address these issues, courses were developed on total rewards management and the basic concept was simplified.Still, compensation professionals are likely to use other terms to refer to it, with the labels for outdated reward strategies—compensation and benefits package and total compensation—being used about as frequently as the new term.ConclusionsIn sum, new concepts in compensation management have the following general profile:•Are novel, but not radically new•Are simple in concept, but complex in execution•Do not always have expert agreement on main tenets•Overlap with prior concepts, creating a misleading impression about their adoption•Result in major execution issues, largely because of conceptual confusion •Do not reach expected adoption figures•Have a place in the field, but not a dominant role.Given this pattern, compensation professionals are advised to examine newconcepts closely to see if the ideas are too broadly defined, reflect expert agreement,represent significant change and provide guidance on execution and best applications. In addition, practitioners should closely review usage surveys of new concepts to determine if a concept’s broad definition and historical roots have caused related prior practices to be counted as evidence of the new one’s acceptance. They also should seek information as to why organizations have turned down or stopped using a new concept. And, at the risk of appearing behind the times, they would bewell-advised to wait until the knowledge base on the concept has been fully developed before adopting it.Source: International Foundation News, 2009(5):p12-15.译文：薪酬管理新概念的理解框架法兰克·詹科拉在过去的25年里，几个主要的薪酬管理的新理念过于反映其雄心勃勃的目标。
