From evaluations to an equitable selection of merit-pay recipients and increments

In the absence of a viable salary-growth model, reasonable people generate arbitrary criteria with nebulous weighting factors for the decisions concerning initial salaries and subsequent increments. Generally, the resulting decisions yield lock-step, salary-growth patterns which include inequities, lack appropriate incentives, and are unsynchronized with cost-of-living increases. A model is described herein which includes the nature of the salary dependence on experience for various levels of performance of faculty members in a subset having the same level of education and the same marketability of their specialties. Application of the model to one subset provides objective procedures which yield, via successive approximations, initial salaries and subsequent increments with optimal equity. Similar application of the model to the several faculty subsets of an institution provides order and equitable order of magnitude in the decisions concerning all initial salaries and all subsequent increments. Consequences of such decision making include incentives to accept the risks of more comprehensive evaluations; rectification of lock-step, salary-growth patterns; and, optimally equitable rewards in consonance with the institution's mission and goals.