A glance at people's engagement behavior with fully pay transparency: From the perspective of a crowd collaboration system

Abstract

The emerging collaborative supply chain and personnel structure have recently pushed the manufacturing ecosystem to support dynamically generated work demands and transparent pay structure. But most employers and some employees are adamantly opposed to more transparent pay systems. Limited by the data availability, studies regarding the relationship between on-the-job performance and pay transparency are far less settled. This paper builds a crowd collaboration incentive system that decentralizes independent contractors' collaboration management process and collects more than 230,000 daily salary records from several real-world factories under full pay transparency. It provides a unique angle to investigate people's active workload choices under a particular pay transparency diffusion structure. Our results show that employees are more likely to actively choose workloads in line with their closest workmates in a fully transparent pay system. Our findings have the potential to accelerate future research to build a more objective and evidence-based pay-transparency system.