Organizational Governance and Trade-Offs Between Pay and Subjective Employee Well-Being

An animated introduction to an article published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations by John Budd and Ryan Lamare. We honor David Marsden by advancing his theorizing and extending his analyses on the willingness of workers to substitute intrinsic rewards for pay in different organizational governance regimes. That is, workers are predicted to be wary of accepting this trade-off in profit- and transactional-oriented organizations because of a greater chance that implicit contracts will be breached relative to mission-oriented organizations. Using the European Working Conditions Survey, we find supportive evidence across 35 European countries while also extend Marsden's theorizing into the comparative domain. Overall, workers might find it harder to obtain their desired combination of pay and subjective well-being in profit- and transactional-oriented organizations, especially in liberal market economies where shareholder primacy is strongest.
Published article (open access): doi.org/10.111...
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