Cui Bonus?

[steepholm]

This poll is prompted by the recent fuss about Stephen Hester's bonus, but it's something I've often wondered about. Just how widespread is the practice of giving performance-related bonuses? We tend to hear about it in connection with bankers, and others who are already paid ridiculous amounts, but is it much more widespread? I can see the argument for incentives, but would find it strange if only rich people needed them, and only in the form of yet more money. While the rest of us are expected to do our jobs properly from a sense of professional pride, are only the rich venal and lazy enough to need a couple of extra million to get out of bed? Surely not!

ETA: I of course should have included "Self-employed" in the job options, as I know that applies to many here, but I guess that falls into the "Not that simple..." box.

[Poll #1815171]

Comments

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

When I was in telecom (account support) and at a dotcom, there were performance-related bonuses, directly linked to sales and customer satisfaction.

Some US universities (especially the non-union ones with actual money) have merit pay -- there's regular cost-of-living raises, and promotion raises, but then administrators look at a combination of teaching evals, courses/number of students/level of students taught, service, and publication (not always in that order, but I know that at my grad uni, at least one of the history chairs denied merit pay to people who slacked on service and teaching undergraduates to focus on writing and teaching postgrad seminars).

At my uni, there's no such thing as a bonus, but I do get the feeling that faculty who pull a bigger load in some areas seem to get a little more travel money from discretionary funds, and sometimes are presented with opportunities that others don't get, like being asked if we'd like to represent the university at a workshop that doesn't really carry any institutional follow-up and is held in a nice place.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Interesting. It sounds as if your university relies quite heavily on patronage of the old-fashioned kind, which works iff the people in charge of the discretionary funds don't practise favouritism and are reliable in their judgements.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Sorry - I meant to add that, having read some of your work posts, I get the impression that in the case of your institution (or at least department) this is in fact the case; but it's easy to see how it might not be.