Reward Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Reward Management - Essay Example Unarguably, reward management is a sensitive and controversial area that has been extensively debated at both practical and theoretical levels. 'The significance of pay as a means of attracting, retaining and providing tangible rewards to people is not to be underestimated. It is important to get it right - much harm can be done by getting it wrong. But as a means of generating long-term commitment and motivation, pay has to be regarded as only part of the whole. It is the non-financial rewards that will ultimately make the difference." Michael Armstrong and Duncan Brown Reward structures can speak volumes; not only in their implications of values, equality and worth to the employees and the community they serve, but to the performance of the authority itself. In this context, it is important for the organization to realize that the organizational rewards have many meanings for employees. There are two values associated with every reward - surface and symbolic. The surface value of a reward to an employee is its objective meaning or worth (a measure of spending power of the employee). In addition to the surface value, every reward also has a symbolic value, which is simply the personal or subjective meaning the employee attaches to it. However, a high salary doesn't always mean a high satisfaction with salary! Nor does a rise in salary necessarily translate into a corresponding rise in satisfaction. The DQ-IDC IT-survey of 2004 reveals this very fact . HP, the best paymaster in the industry, has many employees who look dissatisfied with their salary levels. The employees at Siemens also tend to echo the HP employees' views. On the other hand Mindtree, which is near the bottom of the table in terms of size of the packet, has relatively satisfied employees. So does TCS. And Oracle employees are quite satisfied with their salaries despite Oracle featuring quite low on a ctual salaries. It is results like these that make Maslow's hierarchy of needs look like the absolute truth. In short, managers need to tune in to the many meanings rewards can convey - not only to the surface messages but to the symbolic messages as well. Types of rewards Organizations use various types of rewards (listed below) which when combined form the compensation package of the individual. * Base Pay * Incentive systems * Benefits * Perquisites, and * Awards In the Indian context, while the base pay package (the most important rewards people receive for their work) has seen an increase of 11.3%, an interesting feature to be noted is the rising prevalence of variable pay plans. According to the Asia Pacific Salary Increase Survey conducted by Hewitt , a greater proportion of respondents reported having a variable pay plan in 2004 (88.1%) as compared to 2003 (85.3%). Clearly, performance-based pay which was confined to the higher echelons of management is now creeping in to the lower grades as well. Another matter of debate in

Significance of Belonging in Young Peoples Lives. Belongingness and Essay

Significance of Belonging in Young Peoples Lives. Belongingness and Identity - Essay Example Belongingness is a phenomenon that is characterized with a central feature called identity - be it a individualized or community based, but identity is the core factor governing the sense of belongingness. Identity attributes the exaggeration of outsider versus insider barriers due to polarization, so is happened with nationalism to the larger extent. Identification with one's own ethnic group occurs at the cost of estrangement from the larger societal framework. Belongingness as a manifested form of identity influences the fundamental structure of personal identification at its basic level, whereas, at its most complex level, it articulates the complex involvement with other individuals within the social network, featuring a range of potentially contradictory identity factors contributing to adherence such as gender factor, attitudinal factors, sexual orientation factor, ethnicity factors, ethnic preference factor and so on. When the development of the sense of belongingness is depr ived, it may result in increased anxiety, stress and emotional distress along with various forms of psychopathology and physiological malfunctioning (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Anderman, 2002). Need for Belongingness As stated in Sociometer theory proposed by Leary and Baumeister (2000), there is a strong correlation between one's relational value and perceived self-esteem. If an individual perceives that his or her relational value is at risk, it may lower his or her self-esteem to quite a further. This threat is central to the need for belongingness that educes reflection about the problematic condition and potential solutions, as described by rumination theory proposed by Martin and Tesser (1996). Hence, if the perceived threat of relational inadequacy is continuing through the human system, the distorted self-esteem may cause the threat to repetitively turn out to be the individual's focus of awareness by interfering reflection over the barren goal, namely, the satisfaction of the need for belongingness. Aligned to this fact, rumination theory proposes that the perceived threat to the contentment of a basic need is one of the central factors educing and maintaining reflection (Gold & Wegner, 1995). Forms of Belongingness In order to develop an understanding about the relationship of belongingness to a young's life in terms of their living style, historical context of their existing condition, as well as present contextual framework, a thorough approach in considering the forms of belongingness needs to be assessed. There are essentially two forms of belongingness that influence an individual's life especially a young individual's life to quite a greater extent: belonging to place, inclusive of nationality and neighbourhood and a blend of these two aspects and belonging to sexual community. Belonging to Place In several times, various researchers conducted studies in order to find out the implication of belongingness in an individual's life in relation to the social location the individual belong to. It has been found that the sense of belongingness is shaped by the social location in which an individual belonging into (Rutherford, 1990). Hence, the essential contributing factors shaping a young individual's sense of belongingness include locality, gender, ethnicity, religion and social class. In such a study called Inventing Adulthood Study (London South Bank University, 2006) conducted to find out the sense of national identity among young individuals suggests that the national identity seems to be invisible with an