I was talking a couple of months ago with a very close friend of mine who works in commercial information technology and we were comparing the ways that academia and industry differed. One of the ways surprised me a great deal.
In academia, when you get a job offer from another institution, you are expected to go to the administrators in your institution and see if they'll make a counter-offer. If the counter-offer is big enough, you might stay. I should note that in an era of flat pay, this is a perfectly rational thing for employees to do. But my friend has made me worry whether it is rational for administrators to make counteroffers. My friend said that a lot of managers in I.T. refuse to make counteroffers, for the following sorts of reasons:
- The skills involved in getting a job offer and actually doing excellent work are not tightly correlated enough for it to be rational for managers to play the game. If you always meet counteroffers the end result is that you'll be overpaying all of the "Mr. Hair and Teeth" (I"m not being faceitous when I say that this is actually a technical term in indusrial I.T.) types and underpaying the weird people who actually do the work.
- I.T. work is collaborative and great pay disparities on working teams is profoundly destructive to the kind of esprit de corps necessary for doing a great job.
- Lots of people don't go on the job market because they are happy with how you are running the company; if you waste your payroll rewarding job hoppers you are punishing the very people who are happy with how you are doing things.
- It takes a lot of effort to go on the market; if you make counteroffers you are effectively paying people for not working.
- Independent of whether the prospective job hopper thinks she is acting in good faith, if you as a manager reward it you are encouraging massive dishonesty. People will string along other companies just to get a pay raise in your company. This will justifiably make other companies angry with you the manager for fostering an environment that encourages duplicity and wastes time (which equals money) of everyone concerned. It also infuriates the other employees who are clearer about when they are acting in good faith and refuse to play the game of stringing along other companies.
My friend was really emphatic about the above and in fact tells his employees not to come to him for counteroffers, and whenever one of them gets a job offer says "that sounds like a very good opportunity, you should think carefully about it."
The thing is, everything he said makes sense to me as applied to the practice in academia. I should also say that in our case the counteroffer practice seems to have leaked down from the job hopping administrative class (the average tenure for a provost is under three years, at which point they take another job) and is one of the ways they inflate their salaries so much beyond market value.
I think in some ways academia is where bad management ideas come to die. Anyone who has been subject to "strategic planning" or "assessment" knows that any business that went in for such nonsense would get decimated by competition that didn't. I think that this business of counteroffers is something similar. When I've seen it happen the relevant administrators all too often act like bad movie imitations of business people.
Am I missing anything? This is I hope merely academic (in the pejorative sense) for me since one of my prayers is that I'll never be a chair.
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