An Assessment of Ethical Behaviors in Job Evaluation

Gundars Kaupins is a professor of management at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho. He has written over thirty articles on human resource ethics. An Assessment of Ethical Behaviors in Job Evaluation.

Job evaluation is the process of determining the relative worth of jobs to create a pay structure for an organization (Milkovich and Newman, 1999). As a result of a job evaluation, employees might feel that their compensation system is fair if they know that more difficult jobs are paid more than less difficult jobs.

Unfortunately, a sense of fairness might be based on false or misleading information. Many aspects of a firm's job evaluation system might appear to be objective, fair, and valid. However, upon closer examination, it is evident that many job evaluation systems are vulnerable to organizational and behavioral influences (self-interest among them) that may compromise the integrity of the job evaluation. Unethical acts within job evaluation can abound.