Schulz, F orcid.org/0000-0003-1766-6880, Valizade, D orcid.org/0000-0003-3005-2277 and Charlwood, A orcid.org/0000-0002-5444-194X (2022) The effect of intra-workplace pay inequality on employee trust in managers: Assessing a multilevel moderated mediation effect model. Human Relations, 75 (4). pp. 705-733. ISSN 0018-7267
Abstract
High levels of economic inequality are widely viewed as a key challenge facing both advanced industrial and developing economies. Country-level studies have consistently shown a negative link between income inequality and trust in others. This is typically attributed to greater social distance within unequal societies. Do we observe similar relationships within organisations? This is an important question because employee trust is associated with important outcomes for workers and organisations. We answer it by investigating the relationship between pay inequality and employee trust in managers at the workplace level using large-scale nationally representative matched employer-employee data from Britain. The paper uses innovative machine learning methods to demonstrate a curvilinear relationship between pay inequality and trust. When pay inequality is at low to moderate levels, increasing inequality is associated with increasing employee trust but when pay inequality passes a certain threshold the relationship turns negative. The relationship is mediated by employees’ perceptions of manager fairness and moderated by employee collective voice. The implications of these findings for theory, research methodology, practice and future studies are discussed.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | pay inequality, Trust, Fairness, Equity theory, Employee voice, machine learning, pay dispersion |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Business (Leeds) > Work and Employment Relation Division (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 14 Jan 2021 12:16 |
Last Modified: | 09 Jan 2023 14:39 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0018726721994193 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:169973 |