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This article first summarizes key themes from a recent article by Gerald Ledford that was published in Organizational Dynamics. That article reviewed changes in employee reward systems during the past 35 years, looked at factors explaining the changes and recommended a set of five changes in the future. Five distinguished corporate HR leaders then comment on the article, exploring a number of important topics in contemporary employee rewards. Finally, Ledford summarizes and responds to the commentaries.

Changing conditions will force more organizations to adopt simpler, more flexible, and more nimble pay systems. But to succeed, the plans will require firms to train both managers and employees and to include them in the design process.

Companies will see a "tremendous increase" in experimentation with competency-based pay plans for knowledge workers during the next ten years. While solid outcomes research is still lacking, design choices are becoming clearer.

Asserting that skill-based pay is one of the most rapidly spreading pay innovations in the United States, the author previews and summarizes the three case studies that follow.

While the management of the division that adopted skill-based pay in the early 1980s supported the use of that pay system, they found that the system needed revision over the years to remedy a number of problems.

This study used a quasi-experimental design to assess the effectiveness of self-managing teams in a telecommunications company. These teams performed customer service, technical support, administrative support, and managerial functions in a variety of locations. The balance of evidence indicates that self-managing teams were more effective than comparable traditionally-managed groups that performed the same type of work. The study illustrates the value of a collaborative research project in which researchers and clients jointly define the research questions, study design, and methods.

We present a case study of a 5-year action research project in a 12-plant division of a multi-billion dollar firm. The division is attempting to design new plants and re-design all established plants as high involvement, high performance work systems (Lawler, 1986). The design process is based on a self-design learning model (Mohrman & Cummings, 1989). The history of the change process and data about its effects are reported. We review in detail how the self-design learning system is shaped by the nature of change in a large, multi-level, multi-site organization. We also consider the unusual role of the action researcher in large-scale change.

A large body of research has emerged on the effective implementation of self-managing work teams (SMWTs). However, virtually all of the research has been conducted in manufacturing settings. This article draws upon the authors'research on SMWTs in two service organizations: an insurance operation and a telecommunications company. The authors focused on two research questions: First, they examined the relationships among different dimensions of SMWT effectiveness. Second, the authors explored the key success factors for SMWTs in a service context. They found that the different dimensions of SMWTs'effectiveness do not reinforce one another and are largely unrelated, and that creating an employee involvement (EI) context, work design, and team characteristics were important predictors of SMWT effectiveness. Surprisingly, team leadership was not important for SMWT effectiveness; in fact, sometimes, team leadership was negatively related to effectiveness.

This paper tests a theoretically-driven model of self-managing work team effectiveness. Self-managing work team effectiveness is defined as both high performance and employee quality of work life. Drawing on different theoretical perspectives including work design, self-leadership, sociotechnical, and participative management, four categories of variables are theorized to predict self-managing work team effectiveness: group task design, encouraging supervisor behaviors, group characteristics, and employee involvement context. Data is collected from both a set of self-managing and traditionally managed teams from a large telephone company, and the model is tested with structural equations modeling. Support is found for hypotheses concerning group task design, group characteristics, and employee involvement context, but not encouraging supervisory behaviors.

Compensation professionals are flocking to seminars on innovative reward practices, buying books, and reading journals. But what are the leading companies actually doing? This article summarizes data on reward innovations from a unique new study.

Skill-based pay may be an advantageous option for companies that face intense competitive pressure, that are downsizing, or that encourage employee involvement.