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Higher income makes CEOs meaner to employees -- study
Higher the income means higher the level of CEO meanness, a study at Harvard University revealed. The report comes just days after GM gave $6.6 million in stocks to its top executives.
In a paper "When Executives Rake in Millions: Meanness in Organizations" written in collaboration with Rice University and University of Utah, author Sreedhari Desai says "Increasing executive compensation results in executives behaving meanly toward those lower down the hierarchy".
In conjunction with co-authors Arthur Brief and Jennifer George, Desai analyzed a research paper on employee relations by Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini & Co. (KLD.). Using the above stated data Desai scored the companies, reducing points for companies that had recently been penalized for employee mistreatment, while increasing points for those offering employee profit sharing. After deducting "strength points" from "weakness points" she assigned each firm a "meanness score". The positive correlation between increasing income and increasing meanness was established after comparing the meanness score with executive compensation.