Worse than others but better than before: Integrating social and temporal comparison perspectives to explain executive turnover via pay standing and pay growth
研究整合社会比较与时间比较理论，发现当高管薪酬低于同级时，薪酬增长（随时间增加）能降低离职率，基于近20年美国高管数据验证。
Organizations often pay greater salaries to higher‐ranking executives compared to lower‐ranking executives. While this method can be useful for retaining those at the organization's apex, it may also incline executives at the bottom of the pay pyramid to see themselves at a disadvantage and thus exit the firm. Naturally, organizations often want to retain some of their lower‐paid, but highly valuable executives; the question, then, is how organizations can reduce the turnover of lower‐ranking executives. By integrating social with temporal comparison theory, we argue that, when executives earn relatively less than their peers, more pay growth (i.e., individual pay increases over time) leads to less turnover. The results of our analysis, which covered almost 20 years of objective data on a large sample of U.S. top executives, provide support for our theory.