Worth What You're Paid: A Meaning Maintenance Model Of Compensation And Self-Promotion

Abstract

Previous research demonstrates that employees often engage in self-promotion for instrumental purposes; primary among these is the shaping of others’ views in a manner that achieves desired outcomes including higher compensation. Drawing from the meaning maintenance model (MMM) of motivation, we demonstrate that self-promotion may be better explained through dual complementary motives of self-enhancement and reality-cogency, for the purposes of understanding the world as orderly and establishing one’s own valued place within it. We argue that although self-promotion can be used instrumentally to better one’s own standing, when meaning frameworks are violated by inconsistencies between performance and compensation, organizational actors attempt to restore meaning via self-promotion. Accordingly, using a multi-year archival study and two laboratory experiments, we demonstrate that the causal effect of overcompensation on self-promotion is even greater than the effect of self-promotion on overcompensation. Further, ambiguous compensation cues also trigger sensemaking processes for the purpose of bolstering meaning. Implications for a theory of organizations as meaning structures and recommendations for practice are discussed.