Working Papers

Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations

Research Update: Pay for Skills, Knowledge, and Competencies

Gerald E. Ledford, Jr. and Charles Rivers write that research interest in pay for skills, knowledge, and competencies (SKC) has continued over the past three decades.

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Using Motivation Theory to Improve Gamification

Gerald E. Ledford, Jr. (CEO) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) explore the topic of gamification. Today, the purposeful use of games in work settings is growing rapidly. Organizations are rapidly embracing the systematic use of “gamification,” which brings game-like elements to core managerial processes.

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Revised Employee Involvement: Research Foundations

George S. Benson (University of Texas) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) share that high-involvement management practices (defined as an integrated set of Human Resource and work design practices that are designed to give all employees the skills, information, power, and rewards to make decisions in the workplace) have generated enormous interest among researchers in many different disciplines and geographies.

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What HR Executives Need to Know

Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) explains that talking about HR as a business partner certainly does not help the situation. Asking to be a business partner just does not get the “job done”. This is what HR should be, and in most cases, it should make a very strong argument to be positioned as a major strategic contributor.

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Commentaries on “The Changing Landscape of Employee Rewards: Observations and Prescriptions”

This paper first summarizes key themes from a recent paper by Gerald Ledford that was published in Organizational Dynamics. That paper reviewed changes in employee reward systems during the past 35 years, looked at factors explaining the changes, and recommended a set of five changes in the future. Five distinguished corporate HR leaders then comment on the paper, exploring a number of important topics in contemporary employee rewards.

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Strategic Role of HR

What is the relationship between the design and management of the HR function and HR’s role in organizational strategy? This is the key design question and one that can be answered by examining the research evidence from John W. Boudreau’s (CEO) and Edward E. Lawler’s III (CEO) international survey of hundreds of HR leaders that has been done every three years since 1995.

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The Future of Employee Compensation: Compensation Café Entries

Gerald E. Ledford, Jr. (CEO) This collection is a three-part series that appeared in Compensation Café, the leading blog on reward systems, from December 1-3, 2014. See www.CompensationCafe.com for the original entries and reader responses to them.

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Sustainable Effectiveness Governance Model: Moving Corporations Beyond the Philanthropy Paradigm

This article by Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) and Jay A. Conger (CEO) argues that the ‘sustainable effectiveness’ model of how organizations should operate is a stark contrast to the philanthropic.

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The Crucial-and Underappreciated-Role of HR in Sustainability

Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) and Susan A. Mohrman (CEO) explain that companies that perform well with respect to sustainability can be distinguished from those that don’t by an array of organizational design features.

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The Sustainable Effectiveness Governance Model: Moving Corporations Beyond the Philanthropy Paradigm

Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) and Jay A. Conger (CEO) discuss how historically, organizations have adapted themselves to the paradigm of sustainable effectiveness either by adding a philanthropic function or a department focused on sustainability initiatives. However, both approaches fall seriously short in terms of effectiveness.

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Paying for Skills, Knowledge, and Competencies

Gerald E. Ledford, Jr. (CEO) shares that implementation of skills, knowledge, and competency pay has become commonplace, and usage has gradually increased in the last three decades.

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Talent Agility is Critical

Although there is great agreement that organizations have to get better at changing, there is much less agreement on what organizations need to do in order to become more agile. In our recent book, The Agility Factor, Chris Worley, Tom Williams, and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) provide an answer.

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