Using the Web to Get Your Boss to Pay More

Information is power. Employees now have the convenience of comparing their current salary to other people’s salaries who have similar job titles by using sites such as PayScale.com and/or Salary.com. These web sites aim to level the playing field by allowing people to access detailed information on salaries, giving them more leverage while negotiating with their bosses for a pay increase.

This idea ties into the network exchange theory discussed in class; initially, if there are only two negotiators, A & B, the split it usually equal and each person gets about half. However, if an outside source like another offer or a website, like PayScale.com, is available to person A then person A can have advantage over person B. In the working world, bosses and their subordinates cannot be modeled as equals such as persons A and B, and so these salary websites serve to give employees more power in negotiations to balance the relationship.

The article also discusses potential problems in using this data. There was a survey conducted that found 96% of human resources departments did not trust the data from PayScale.com since it is user-reported. People can misreport information if they don’t understand what types of benefits or bonuses they are getting. In addition, the information on different jobs is completely dependent on the number of people who decide to contribute and therefore, the data is most accurate when there is a lot of data. These sites still need to improve the range of information they have on different jobs. Also, in asking a boss for a raise, an online source with salaries does not always suffice because other things need to be taken into account such as the company’s current financial status and historical turnover rate.