THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZATIONAL INCENTIVES

To improve understanding and design of organizational incentives, we u sed confidential compensation data obtained for four distinct organiza tional levels (ranging from plant manager to corporate chief executive officer) to evaluate the ability of tournament, managerial power, and agency theories to explain these observed compensation data. Our resu lts suggest that organizational incentives are most appropriately char acterized by a combination of these models, rather than being complete ly described by a single theoretical description.