Accounting for the Gap: A Firm Study Manipulating Organizational Accountability and Transparency in Pay Decisions

The author is grateful for the financial support received from the James S. Hardigg (1945) Work and Employment Fund and the MIT Sloan School of Management. The author thanks many colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their feedback on earlier versions of this article, specifically Roberto Fernandez, Thomas Kochan, Paul Osterman, Ben Rissing, Lotte Bailyn, Susan Silbey, and Aruna Ranganathan. The author also thanks Steve Benard, Bill Barnett, Kate Parsons, Trond Petersen, and Nancy Rothbard for their suggestions. An earlier version of this study was presented at the 2012 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Boston, the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics in Madrid, and the 2011 American Sociological Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas. The author is also thankful for the feedback from participants of a number of research seminars, including those organized by the Life Course Center and the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, the Sociology Department at Boston University, the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, the Columbia Business School, the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, and the Interdisciplinary Committee on Organizational Studies (ICOS) at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Several members present in the company under study also provided great help during the data collection process. The author thanks the people who held the following positions during the key studied periods: the director and the vice president of HR, the head of the HR research unit, and several middle-level HR managers. The views expressed here are exclusively those of the author.