A team of researchers, led by Boris Maciejovsky, professor at the UC Riverside School of Business, looked into the question.
Their study reveals that this transparency, often perceived as a lever for greater fairness, can also have perverse effects, generating tension, demotivation and loss of cohesion.
When an employee finds out how much their colleagues earn, it is not only their sense of justice that is challenged. The feeling of fairness, personal motivation and even team spirit can be profoundly disrupted. This is due to “standard-based entitlement.”
This concept refers to the fact that the closer an employee feels to the top of the performance ranking, the more they feel they deserve a high salary.
But what does this ranking consist of? It is an internal evaluation based on criteria such as productivity, objectives achieved or feedback from management. Once the position is revealed, it becomes a structuring benchmark for professional self-esteem.
Feelings of entitlement and frustration
To better understand this phenomenon, the researchers conducted four separate experiments. In one of them, the participants had to imagine themselves looking for a job after learning their position in a previous company.
As a result, those ranked in the top three demanded a significantly higher salary than the others, although they had all received the same starting offer.
Another experiment confirmed this trend: the higher a person’s ranking, the more they feel justified in negotiating a better salary.
Conversely, employees with lower ratings are reluctant to assert their rights, doubt their value and can end up becoming demoralised. This dynamic can weaken team spirit and adversely affect the working environment.
For Boris Maciejovsky, the key lies in the way in which companies choose to communicate on individual success standards.
“Organisations should carefully consider the type of information shared with employees, as the appropriateness of this information may depend on the employees’ relative performance,” he explains in a news release.
This analysis qualifies the idea that salary transparency is an obvious lever for fairness and motivation. It highlights the complexity of human dynamics, emphasising that the quest for justice can sometimes accentuate divisions.
With more and more US states, such as California, requiring the publication of salaries in job advertisements, and the European Union imposing by June 2026 the transposition of a directive obliging companies to disclose the pay gap between women and men, the question of the real impact of this transparency is becoming crucial.
For researchers, the answer lies in a corporate culture that values all contributions, regardless of performance level, in order to avoid encouraging counterproductive competition.
“Transparency is a powerful tool. But like any tool, it can have unintended consequences if we don’t use it wisely,” warns Boris Maciejovsky.
In short, pay transparency can be an effective lever, provided it is used with discernment. It can motivate some while discouraging others. More than a question of figures, it invites people to rethink the mechanisms of recognition at work.