Merit Award and Pay Raise

[marshwiggle]

Over the years I've discovered that everyone thinks they deserve more merit.

The Lake Wobegon effect.

[Ruralguy]

I don't think *everyone* feels this way.  There are a number of slackers who do what they can to get through the day, and do nothing else.
I think they know it, and thus don't complain about merit pay. Then, though a smaller number, there are those who get it, but don't really care if they do, or who don't think they deserve it.

[marshwiggle]

I don't think *everyone* feels this way.  There are a number of slackers who do what they can to get through the day, and do nothing else.
I think they know it, and thus don't complain about merit pay. Then, though a smaller number, there are those who get it, but don't really care if they do, or who don't think they deserve it.

I think there's a large group of people who work hard, but aren't terribly effective, but don't realize it, and thus think they deserve recognition.

[pgher]

ISince they did not had this program for last 3 years due to pandemic and I joined only three years back, this is my first experience with this award program. Since I  joined the university, Overall during last 3 years, I  got ...

This is a point that I don't think anyone has brought up. If there hasn't been a merit raise program for three years, there is a backlog of people who need to be rewarded. Also, your starting salary was probably higher than people who have been there a while due to salary compression. As a result, the dean et al. may have looked at your performance relative to compensation, then looked at other people's performance relative to compensation, and decided to try to fix some compression issues.

[doc700]

If you are in a heavy grants based area, isn't much of your "merit pay" tied to your grant fundraising?  I have a 9 month salary and need to raise my summer salary from grants.  Depending on my success with fundraising, I get variable numbers of months of funding.  I treat my 9 month salary as my base and then anything else I get from the summer salary as my "bonus" for that year.  In my field we have ~100K/year NSF etc grants so I can usually only squeeze a fraction of a month of summer salary into each federal grant and would need say half a dozen active grants to get the full 2 months of federal support.  This is not a permanent raise, but directly tied to my work and causes my take home pay to fluctuate by a lot more than 2K per year.

[Mobius]

It's like asking a search committee why you didn't get hired. Do you really want to know? If so, are you going to just be a PITA?

[Ruralguy]

Its not as if they'd say "Its because you are a stupid a-hole."  They'll just say that the university has many more high achievers than you might think (and I'd hope that many folks at many R1's have big grants, lots of publications, and are also stellar teachers, etc.). Someone more honest might also add in a bit about also making corrections for compression and inversion (if that indeed is what happened, and it could be, but doesn't really have to be the case).

But yeah, there's no point in asking. If you and other faculty feel that the process should be clarified, then perhaps you can approach the Dean as a group (the union if there is one, the appropriate faculty committee, or just a gaggle of reasonably respected faculty) and ask for written clarification.

[bio-nonymous]

If you are in a heavy grants based area, isn't much of your "merit pay" tied to your grant fundraising?  I have a 9 month salary and need to raise my summer salary from grants.  Depending on my success with fundraising, I get variable numbers of months of funding.  I treat my 9 month salary as my base and then anything else I get from the summer salary as my "bonus" for that year.  In my field we have ~100K/year NSF etc grants so I can usually only squeeze a fraction of a month of summer salary into each federal grant and would need say half a dozen active grants to get the full 2 months of federal support.  This is not a permanent raise, but directly tied to my work and causes my take home pay to fluctuate by a lot more than 2K per year.

This is a good point. We are 12-m faculty, but we get a recapture of some of the salary buyout direct costs from grants as a bonus each year--according to some mythical never explained formula guarded closely by upper-administration... Of course we also get  indirect recapture for a lab slush fund which is at least well-explained and transparent.

[Ruralguy]

And this may indeed be part of why some people didn't get the full merit award. Maybe the Dean was told "these grant folks have ways of siphoning off some addition to their regular salary, so until they exhaust that possibility, we shouldn't give them full merit pay." Of course, that may not be part of what is going on with OP at all, but this is part of what can come out of a discussion. So while I don't encourage her/him to personally ask the Dean about specifics of why (s)he wasn't given the highest award, it would be all the more reason to discuss with a wider group of faculty and open a discussion with the administration once there is more power in the group and more information. 

[mleok]

For what it's worth, I was at a public university in the Midwest, and our annual raises were determined by the department head. There was an unspoken convention of trying to use the annual raise pool in such a way that we did not have salary inversion (where a higher ranked professor was paid less than a lower ranked one). With the market pressure from new hires, a lot of that raise pool was consumed just by the across the board increases necessary to prevent salary inversion. I had a friend who was one year ahead of me on the tenure-track, who brought in over $1.5 million in single PI grants, and he was only paid about $2K more than the fresh assistant professors we hired. Needless the say, that is frustrating, and probably the reason why we both left that institution eventually.

I suspect that since you're relatively new, your salary is probably already high relative to your peers, and giving you the full $4K increase would result in even more problems globally. Put another way, it's sometimes better to make one person unhappy, than to make an entire department unhappy.

[Hegemony]

One way to frame it would be "What would I have to do to get the top ranking in the next merit period?"

[mleok]

One way to frame it would be "What would I have to do to get the top ranking in the next merit period?"

Even that is a pointless question, because it's about how you rank relative to everyone else when the time comes.

[Hegemony]

There's probably an average level of achievement for the top ranking, though. The head could say something like, "Well, people who get the top ranking generally publish between X and Y number of articles, and so you'd need more than you had this time around. And they generally get a grant from a big agency like This or That." And so on.

Another tactic would be to look at the CVs of the people who seem to be the most dynamic in your department, and match them up against yours. Not everything shows on the CV, of course. But if you're behind on some measurements, that would be useful to know.

[fizzycist]

Another tactic would be to look at the CVs of the people who seem to be the most dynamic in your department, and match them up against yours. Not everything shows on the CV, of course. But if you're behind on some measurements, that would be useful to know.

Well intentioned advice, but I would suggest to ignore it. There is so much pressure to compare ourselves with peers and to compete constantly. We all do it no matter what, but the least we can do is try to avoid it when it comes to our friends in the department. Save the competition for the golden child Harvard/Stanford/etc. folks who are submitting to the same grant calls.

[Hegemony]

I don't mean everyone should do it. I mean it might help the OP, who is puzzled as to why he's not in the top tier, get a sense of what the top tier looks like in his department. He's already comparing himself to his colleagues, but without much context to go by.