About the research
It is often believed that if employees are given higher wages this will make them more satisfied and less anxious about their jobs. However, researchers from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the Institute of Social Research in Oslo have been investigating if this is really true as part of a larger study on the relationship between worker well-being and workplace performance.
Using UK Data Service data, they discovered that while receiving higher wages does increase employees’ job satisfaction, it also causes them higher job anxiety. One possible reason for this association is the possibility that workers engaged in more responsible work are compensated for the additional anxiety with higher pay, but this proves not to be the case. Instead, they show the additional anxiety arises as workers seek to reciprocate for the additional wages they have received.
Methodology
The researchers linked responses from the Workplace Employment Relations Survey’s employee and employer questionnaires. They used descriptive and multivariate analyses linking worker well-being (job satisfaction and job anxiety) to wage levels and relative wages in the workplace.
The researchers also extracted a number of job effort measures which allowed them to distinguish between two possible reasons for a link between higher wages and greater anxiety. The first possible explanation is the idea that higher wages compensate for additional effort. The effort measures that were extracted from the dataset were:
- whether the worker supervises other workers
- overtime hours worked
- agreement with the statement ‘My job requires me to work hard’
- the degree of job autonomy
The second possible explanation is the idea that anxiety arises when workers seek to reciprocate for the higher wages they receive from the employer. This effect is independent of effort.
Publications
Bryson, A., Barth, E. and Dale-Olsen, H. (2012) ‘Do higher wages come at a price?’, Journal of Economic Psychology, 33(1) pp. 251-263. doi: 10.1016/j.joep.2011.10.005 Retrieved 11 September 2013 from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487011001620#
Bryson, A., Barth, E. and Dale-Olsen, H. (2010) Do higher wages come at a price?, Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No. 1011. Retrieved 11 September 2013 from http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1011.pdf
Bryson, A., Barth, E. and Dale-Olsen, H. (2010) Do higher wages come at a price?, National Institute for Economic and Social Research Discussion Paper No. 371, November. Retrieved 11 September 2013 from http://niesr.ac.uk/sites/default/files/publications/231110_173447.pdf