Le mythe du salaire d’efficience

Selon une approche keynésienne, il existe un chômage involontaire dont l’explication est apportée par la théorie du salaire d’efficience.

D’après Shapiro et Stiglitz, l’origine du problème réside dans l’asymétrie d’information. L’employeur ne pouvant pas connaître parfaitement l’effort fourni par chacun de ses salariés, il se décide à augmenter leur salaire pour les motiver, mais surtout, à éviter qu’ils n’aillent voir ailleurs; le salaire d’efficience fidélise le salarié. Le problème devient apparent lorsque chaque employeur se met à augmenter ses propres salaires. Puisque chaque employeur ne pourra pas récupérer les salariés de ses concurrents, les salariés sont surpayés. Et parce qu’ils sont surpayés, la demande de travail diminue, ce qui augmente le chômage. Un cas typique de dilemme du prisonnier.

La théorie suppose, en toute logique, que les salariés vont mettre plus d’entrain au travail, ce qui permettrait en somme de réduire les phénomènes de sélection adverse, en gardant les meilleurs éléments car les salariés seront moins incités à quitter leur travail actuel. Il s’avère que si le chômage augmente de cette façon, les salariés montrent davantage d’ardeur dans le travail, ne serait-ce que par peur du chômage. Autrement dit, le coût de la rotation (turnover cost) diminue.

Deux questions méritent d’être posée. Existe-t-il un salaire d’efficience ? La théorie du salaire d’efficience est-elle exacte ? Les réponses sont “oui” et “non” respectivement.

Les petites entreprises, particulièrement les PME, sont plus fragiles que les grandes entreprises. Leurs profits sont beaucoup plus volatiles. C’est pourquoi elles tendent parfois à accumuler de la trésorerie pour amortir les chocs au lieu d’investir. Dans le même temps, les salariés peuvent préférer les grandes entreprises, car elles ont du prestige, elles sont plus solides, elles peuvent fournir de meilleures conditions de travail parce qu’elles bénéficient des économies d’échelles. Tout cela et bien d’autres avantages font que les petites entreprises doivent payer une sorte de “prime de risque” pour attirer les salariés les plus productifs. Compte tenu du fait que les entreprises diffèrent en taille, toutes les entreprises ne peuvent pas s’aligner sur le même taux de salaire, et donc payer toutes à la fois un ‘salaire d’efficience’. Il n’y a pas de chômage résultant d’un salaire d’efficience.

On peut penser néanmoins que ce n’est pas juste. On peut dire que les petites entreprises n’investissent pas assez, ne créent pas assez d’emploi ce faisant. Il faut bien comprendre aussi qu’elles ne sont pas aidées. Des normes réglementaires excessives, telles que les normes d’hygiène et de sécurité de haut niveau, relativement moins coûteuses pour un site qui compte 1 000 salariés que pour un site qui en compte 10, font gonfler les coûts fixes que les petites entreprises ont dû mal à encaisser.

En outre, les petites entreprises ne trouvent pas le financement nécessaire à leur croissance. Il y a deux raisons à cela. D’abord, les gains en capital sont taxés. Ce faisant, les Business Angels refusent de prendre le risque de perdre leur argent en impôts si l’entreprise échoue, ou de voir une part substantielle de leurs gains revenir au mains de l’état si l’entreprise réussit. Ensuite, la dette fédérale imprime un fort effet d’éviction qui assèche les investissements créateurs d’emplois. Pourquoi l’investisseur risquerait-il son capital dans une entreprise naissante lorsque la dette fédérale rapporte à peu près autant, le risque en moins ?
Cela peut être vu comme une des causes du chômage, lorsque ces réglementations s’additionnent aux politiques de salaire minimum. La raison est que les grandes entreprises licencient à tour de bras, car elles font des gains de productivité tandis que la demande en biens de consommation est plus ou moins inélastique. Il est donc nécessaire que la main d’œuvre supplémentaire soit absorbée par les petites entreprises.

De leur côté, les grandes entreprises ont aussi un incitatif à payer les salariés au salaire d’efficience. La raison tient au fait qu’il peut être difficile de surveiller ses salariés. Autrement dit, le salaire d’efficience se substitue au coût de la surveillance interne (monitoring cost). Dans une petite entreprise, la surveillance mutuelle résout aisément ces problèmes de “free riding”. On dit que dans une grande entreprise, les salariés sont trop nombreux ou trop dispersés les uns des autres pour pouvoir pratiquer cette surveillance, à tel point que le coût de cette surveillance mutuelle serait extrêmement élevé.
D’abord, il n’est pas certain que ce soit vrai. Le problème est bien plus complexe. En vérité, il est tout à fait possible d’organiser des petits groupes autonomes exerçant une pression à l’intérieur du groupe et entre les groupes dont la productivité affecte son salaire, de sorte que l’interdépendance entre et à l’intérieur de chaque groupe facilite la surveillance mutuelle. Par exemple, les retards de l’entretien et du ravitaillement empêche un avion de décoller à temps, même si les passagers ont pris place et que les bagages sont chargés à temps et que l’avion est déjà prêt à décoller.
Dénoncer les free riders offre une belle prime compensatoire pour l’effort de surveillance, tout en sanctionnant les free riders.
C’est exactement comme cela que Continental Airlines s’est affranchie des phénomènes de sélection adverse.

III. Free Riding and Mutual Monitoring

In this section, we argue that, despite its size, Continental exploited the benefits of mutual monitoring, thus mitigating the free-riding problem. […]

Free Riding and Mutual Monitoring in Large Firms

An incentive scheme like Continental’s is expected to raise efforts only if the additional likelihood of receiving the bonus is sufficient to compensate employees for working harder. Formally, an individual employee deciding whether or not to work hard will do so if and only if bg > c, where b describes the value of the bonus, g denotes the incremental likelihood that the bonus is paid when the employee works hard, and c represents the amount required to compensate an employee for additional effort. Because a single employee has a negligible influence on overall performance, we expect g to be very small. It is this observation that makes the apparent success of Continental’s bonus scheme so surprising. In general, we expect g to be a decreasing function of firm size (n) because overall firm performance is less sensitive to the actions of individual employees in large firms.

By paying all employees a bonus based on satisfaction of a common goal, Continental’s incentive scheme introduces externalities between the efforts of employees and the welfare of their colleagues. Choice of low effort by any employee not only reduces the probability that he or she will receive the bonus, it also affects the likelihood that other employees will receive the bonus. This creates incentives for employees to monitor their colleagues and encourage them to work harder. Mutual monitoring (sanctioning) can take on two forms. First, there is peer pressure in the form of direct sanctioning of co-workers who do not work hard, together with peer pressure generated by the feeling of shame from not working as hard as colleagues (Kandel and Lazear 1992). [20] Second, an employee may sanction a co-worker by reporting low effort to management. Either way, mutual monitoring is an additional penalty imposed on co-workers who work below (or above) the effort norm established by the group.

There are two reasons to doubt that mutual monitoring will support a high effort norm. First, to the extent that it is costly to monitor and sanction co-workers, there is an incentive to free ride on the monitoring and sanctioning efforts of other co-workers. Moreover, just like the first-order free-rider problem, the larger the group the greater the second-order free-rider problem. Hence, the likelihood of effective mutual monitoring is decreasing in both the size of the group and cost of the mutual monitoring. Second, Continental’s employees were geographically dispersed, restricting direct interactions and preventing them from observing the efforts of employees at other locations. Both reasons have been used previously to support forceful predictions that mutual monitoring will not occur in large firms. [21]

Mutual Monitoring within Continental’s Autonomous Work Groups

The presence of autonomous work groups mitigates the second-order free-rider problem by reducing group size. This makes monitoring more feasible and limits the opportunity to free ride on the monitoring and sanctioning efforts of colleagues. Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that the structure of airport operations dramatically reduces the cost of monitoring. Ramp and gate employees typically work alongside each other performing overt tasks: pushing out or waving in aircraft, loading and unloading baggage, and greeting and boarding passengers. As a result, they are well placed to observe the performance of fellow team members. Moreover, tasks are standardized and rotated, so employees have a common understanding of what behavior distinguishes high and low effort. [22] For example, employees unloading baggage from a cart have also spent time inside the hold and can recognize whether delays are due to unusually heavy baggage or neglect by an employee in the hold. Finally, the organization of employees into groups ensures repeated interactions with the same colleagues, revealing habitual (rather than isolated) behavioral patterns.

We might expect that working repeatedly alongside the same colleagues would aggravate sanctioning costs by increasing the cost of damaging social relationships. However, Coleman (1990) argues that in the general context of group norms, sanctioning need not be costly if there is consensus that a high effort “norm” has been violated. Consensus reduces the costs of sanctioning for several reasons. First, it provides social support to the individual that implements the sanction. Second, it may lead to sanctions implemented at the group level (e.g., ostracism from the group’s social interaction). Third, it may increase the likelihood of managerial sanctions against the violator. Finally, the mere knowledge that other group members will discuss a norm violator’s behavior may ensure compliance with the norm. [23]

Some of the factors that facilitate monitoring also facilitate consensus. Regular interaction with the same employees provides ample opportunity for information about poor performance to be disseminated. Because the work process is standardized, there is a common and accurate interpretation of poor performance. Finally, a high degree of interdependence between group members causes the costs of norm violation (low effort) to be shared. Interdependence is introduced both by the bonus itself (everyone cares about joint output) and the nature of the ramp and gate operations. A flight cannot depart until the entire ramp and gate activities have been performed, so that poor performance by one employee can negate good performance by the rest of the group. For example, maintenance or fueling delays will prevent a flight from leaving on time, even if passengers and baggage are loaded and the plane is otherwise ready to leave. Similarly, if the flight crew is slow to complete their preflight checks, passengers cannot be boarded despite the completion of catering and cleaning activities.

The nature and organization of the gate and ramp activities appear to support our claim that monitoring and sanctioning within Continental’s work groups were feasible and may not have been costly. Conditional on a work group agreeing to adopt a high effort norm, consensus that an employee is performing poorly will develop quickly and support sanctioning. Although formal evidence of sanctioning and monitoring is hard to collect, we did learn of several examples that offer further support for our claim.

Anecdotal Evidence

As a part of our initial data-gathering exercise we interviewed the CEO, the COO, three supervisors, five ramp and gate employees, and airport managers at three of Continental’s airports (including its largest hub). Four of the ramp and gate employees were interviewed as a focus group. We asked questions concerning the overall structure of operations and observed the process of performing ramp and gate activities. We also posed a series of open-ended questions directed at identifying perceived changes in employee behavior and the reasons for these changes. [24] Care was taken to avoid leading questions, especially concerning the bonus scheme. The responses and anecdotes that follow are firsthand accounts of employee, supervisor, and airport manager experiences.

A consistent response from the focus group discussion was the emergence of a team orientation that had been absent prior to 1995. We were concerned that employees were reciting the new corporate “mantra” and so asked for explicit examples of employees behaving “more like a team.” We were told that after introduction of the scheme, employees began initiating their own performance reviews whenever airport operations caused a flight to be delayed. These meetings, which were neither attended nor sponsored by managers, focused on identifying sources of delay. Employees also began contacting colleagues who had called in sick, to ask whether any assistance was needed. According to the employees, these calls enabled them to monitor whether the absences were due to valid illnesses. [25]

We also heard several examples of employees sanctioning each other, including employees being summoned from break rooms by colleagues, employees being chastised for leaving their stations, and gate agents climbing into aircraft holds to identify and help overcome sources of delay. In one example, employees themselves initially attempted to improve a colleague’s performance by providing additional training and reallocating his tasks. When this did not resolve the problem, they reported the situation to management, which (after further opportunities to improve) led to that employee’s dismissal. An increase in the use of social sanctions was apparently particularly noticeable during the pilots’ industrial action in May and June of 1995. The industrial action had a dramatic effect, resulting in rankings of eighth and tenth in on-time performance for May and June (respectively). [26] Gate and ramp employee reacted strongly, directly confronting pilots who were causing delays and withdrawing cooperation such as access to break rooms and recommendations for dining and ground transportation.

During the focus group the employees volunteered the bonus scheme as an important factor influencing changes in their own behavior. One employee stated that the bonus plan proved that management was serious, and another employee admitted, in a somewhat embarrassed tone, that $65 was an attractive incentive. These sentiments appeared to be shared by the other employees.

Pour les besoins de l’argumentation, on va supposer que toutes les entreprises sans exception ont un incitatif à payer les employés au salaire d’efficience. Les salariés les plus productifs n’auront plus aucun incitatif à quitter leur emploi actuel. Mais assumons quand même le contraire. Que va-t-il se passer, en ce cas ? Le chômage va augmenter. Mais si on va au bout du raisonnement, on se rend compte que l’augmentation du chômage imprime un sentiment de crainte dans l’esprit des salariés qui ne vont pas prendre le risque de jouer les free riders parce qu’il y a des chômeurs qui se bousculent pour obtenir un emploi. Autrement dit, il sait que s’il perd cet emploi, il n’est pas assuré d’en trouver un ailleurs. Et c’est une chose que l’employeur lui-même ne doit pas ignorer. Puisque le chômage a augmenté, l’employeur se retrouve en position de force. S’il avait eu l’idée de payer ses propres employés au salaire d’efficience, il n’aurait fait que donner plus de mains d’œuvres à ses concurrents qui vont pouvoir embaucher pour moins cher.

Sur le papier, la théorie du salaire d’efficience échoue sur toute la ligne.