Pay structure and performance in team settings: evidence from the italian football league

In this study we adopt an equity perspective to investigate the role of pay structures in influencing individual performance in highly interdependent team-settings. Despite the large agreement among equity theorists in considering job performance decrements as one of the main strategies used by employees to reduce their efforts in response to situations of organizational inequity, the existing empirical findings are quite controversial. Our (preliminary) analysis on the players of the Italian Football League teams confirms the complexity of such relationships showing that both pay levels and within-team pay dispersion are positively related to individual performance, though for pay dispersion the relationship is quite weak in significance. These results question the validity of the equity approach in a context of overall high pay levels and suggest interesting lines of inquiry for the further development of this study as well as for the strategic compensation research field.