Benefits and Compensation

Benefit - Employee benefits typically refers to retirement plans, health life insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, vacation, employee stock ownership plans, etc. Benefits are increasingly expensive for businesses to provide to employees, so the range and options of benefits are changing rapidly to include, for example, flexible benefit plans.
             - Employee benefits and (especially in British English) benefits in kind (also called fringe benefits, perquisites, perqs or perks) are various non-wage compensations provided to employees in addition to their normal wages or salaries.^[1] Where an employee exchanges (cash) wages for some other form of benefit, this is generally referred to as a 'salary sacrifice' or 'salary exchange' arrangement. In most countries, most kinds of employee benefits are taxable to at least some degree. 

Compensation -  Includes topics in regard to wage and/or salary programs and structures, for example, salary ranges for job descriptions, merit-based programs, bonus-based programs, commission-based programs.

Summary of chapter two

Bases of job-related behavior

                This chapter tackles with the discussions about the discussions about the factors that associated with the differences of job-related behaviors. It is said that factors such as individual differences and job setting greatly affects certain human behaviors in the work place. Behavior generally varies along two dimensions. Quantitative behaviors can be measured in some units appropriate to the behavior under consideration. Qualitative are behaviors that can be characterized by essentially evaluating view, somewhere along the scale of “goodness-badness” or”desirable-undesirable”. Thus we see that there are many kinds of variables that can influence the work performance or behavior of people. This research objective is to determine the relationship between specific individuals and situational variables and relevance of job related behaviors of people. The results from this can be used as the basis for taking some action to bring about improvement and implied strategy to seek optimized combination of people and jobs so as to increase effectiveness of human involvement in producing goods and services to enhance desirable human values in the process. 

Summary chapter one:

Introduction

                Human work is concerned with the production and distribution of goods and services. It undergone so many innovations that leads to the machination of the hand tools that simple workers used in the early years,  as a result substantial effects such as reduction of human labor, improvement in working results and higher income emerges, but along with this, essential human work elements are compromised.

                Industrial psychology is the study of human behavior in work related aspects and application of this knowledge to minimize human problems. Its premises viewed as desirable objects of industry directed toward maximizing the sum of the satisfactions of both the producers and the consumers and minimizing the existence of human problems and somehow to resolve or if possible prevent them.

                Early psychologists were concerned particularly with the problems of personnel selection that leads to the use of personnel test which tends to require the employers to know the applicant’s relatedness to work. Entailed with this are the growing interest in the leadership styles, management philosophies, organizational policies and structures, incentive systems and other aspects of organizations as they relate to both human satisfactions and organizational effectiveness.

Modus operandi of the Industrial Psychology:

1.        Identification of the problems

                -it is the indication of organizational ineffectiveness and inadequate job performance of people: high personnel turnover rates; injuries; poor employee morale; dissatisfaction; controversy and occasional conflict and failure to fulfill the reasonable needs of consumers.

2.       Methods

                                -it falls into three classes:

                                1. Experimental design (methods of investigation)

                                2. Data collection (use of test, questionnaires, rating, performance appraisal,                                                     observation and job analysis)

                                3. Statistical analysis methods.

    3. Findings

                                -It tackles with the results from statistical methods, and it falls into two predominant     categories:

                                1.  Theories of generalization (use of feedback in learning)

                                2. Empirically derived research findings (times required to learn a job by different                                            training methods)

   4. Application of findings

                                -The adoption of certain practices or procedures, policies and actions predicated on the findings in the questions.