Toward fairer global reward: Lessons from international non-governmental organizations

Global reward management plays a fundamental role in supporting the attraction, motivation and retention of employees, and yet recent research has underscored limitations of the dominant balance sheet approach, including inequity between host country national and expatriate staff. To shed light on how reward in international contexts can be structured to address issues of fairness and equity, this study explores approaches to global reward in international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), an underexplored context where fairness may be particularly salient. Through an inductive study of 15 INGOs, we show how organizations are reconceptualizing global reward systems by questioning dominant assumptions of the expatriate workforce and the jobs they do, and broadening consideration of reward to include both monetary and non-monetary components. Doing so enables incremental shifts toward strategic alignment of global reward with underlying social values. Our findings provide important insights for organizations operating internationally about how global reward can be structured to address concerns of fairness, while still enabling organizations to meet their demands for particular skills.