L’evoluzione delle politiche retributive e la valorizzazione delle risorse umane: riflessioni a margine di un’indagine empirica

The paper focuses its attention on the evolution of compensation systems, that enterprises use to attract, motivate and retain people, according to the classic definition, that we can find both in literature (i.e. Mahoney, 1999; Beer et alii, 1985) and in business practices. This goal is considered fundamental in order to reach success in competition, first of all because people (their competencies and their knowledge) are the strategic resource ((i.e. Costa e Gianecchini (2005); Giorgetti (2003); MCCour ed Eldridge (2003); Boldizzoni e Manzolini (2000); Costa (a cura di) (1992); Tichy et alii (1984) and it’s strategic to take care of them. Compensation policies used a lot of initiatives essentially organized around different combinations of the monetary components. The effective efficacy of compensation policies in reaching their aim is, however, discussed and not clearly identified: surely, these solutions produce a higher work cost, but they don’t assure a real fidelity function for workers. Moreover, changes in work and in working ways ask for a greater involvement for worker – who needs strong supports, beyond money (whose undisputed relevance is considered “not sufficient”) . So, initiatives and experiences - that succeed in imaging and defining new systems able to answer to different, varied and complicated needs of persons working in organizations - begin to appear. In some way it might be sufficient to date back to Barnard’s (1938) considerations, to understand that the contributions an organisation asks for and the incentives it offers in exchange constitute a perfect background to set the problem we are analyzing in this paper. As known, Barnard defined organisation as a cooperative system, that depends upon two conditions: its effectiveness (related to the accomplishment of the cooperative purpose), pursued through the economy of incentives: he pointed out that incentives, one organisation should refer to, are both material (monetary and physical) and immaterial (intangible). These last ones are considered even more effective in supporting the management role in motivating people. Barnard wrote “Efficiency for the individual is satisfactory exchange. An organization which makes material things the principal incentive will be unable long to offer this kind of incentive if it’s unable to secure at least as much material or money as it pays out” (Barnard (1938), pag.153,). This is an important indication – too often underestimated or misunderstood- which brings new attention to everything that rewards people: so, it’s the whole set of incentives which should be managed by the Human Resources department, looking for a balance between individual preferences, constraints in resources and the organisation’s scopes, a balance to be continuously redefined according to the evolution in subjective and objective situations. This paper wants to add its contribution to the evolution of rewarding policies towards wider logics, both on the theoretical level and the corporate experiences, by presenting Total Reward System as an innovative tool to decline the objective of people’s engagement. In order to target this goal, the paper is organized into three paragraphs. In the first, Total Reward System is presented as a new approach, able to favourite a better and fruitful answer to the complex motivational context that characterizes each worker: we discuss about a definition and propose a general mainframe, where Total Reward different instruments can be positioned. The next paragraph presents a research on the practises of Total Reward: after the exposition of the hypothesis proposed for the research and of the methodology (essentially a qualitative one, developed through semistructured interviews with HR managers of a sample of 40 enterprises present in Italian North West regions), the most important acquisitions are put in evidence to discuss present trend. Finally, some considerations are proposed in order to discuss the future of Total Reward Systems, underlining a significant gap between theoretical indications in literature and HR practices.