Organizational Career Attainment : the Salaries of Male Managers

This paper examines the effects of certain achievement-related personal characteristics on firm-specific variation in the salary attainment of white male managers of a utility firm. Special emphasis is given to assessing the degree to which the effects of personal attributes on current salary are transmitted via starting salary and/or via the rate of increase in salary. Characteristics found to have a significant direct effect on starting salary include education, starting age, and previous organizational experience; characteristics having a significant direct effect on the rate of increase in salary include education, religious group membership, and, ambiguously, previous organizational experience. The analysis also turned up evidence of significant temporal fluctuation in the effect of education and previous experience -but not of religious group membership -on the level in the company hierarchy at which a manager begins his organizational career. On the negative side, neither family origins nor nativity had an effect on the salary attainment of these managers.