Organization 21C: Someday All Organizations Will Lead This Way

Revisiting the Concept of Equity

To ease the administrative burden associated with reward decision making, organizations in the 20th century focused on developing pay systems around the job as the unit of pay rather than the person as the unit of pay. This practice dates back to the world wars. To aid the war efforts, it was far easier to design reward systems for thousands of jobs than for millions of people. Job evaluation systems that were created during the world wars became the method that was used to link jobs to pay rather than people to pay. This approach was adopted by industry right after World War II and was used throughout the rest of the 20th century.

This job-based approach focused employees on the description of their jobs, as ...