MQM 354 exam 2 quizes

Steve has a small company with 12 employees. One of his employees, Larry, has been laid off because his work has been outsourced. Larry had health coverage through Steve's company and wants to continue that coverage. According to COBRA, how long can Larry continue his coverage through Steve's company after being laid off?

0 months

For an employee to gain lifetime coverage under Social Security, they must have worked for ____ quarters during which they were covered by the Act.

40

Which of the following is Not true of expatriates?

49% of U.S. expatriates are women

Michael was laid off by his company owing to budget cuts. Before being laid off, he earned $1,000 per week. If he has been receiving unemployment insurance benefits for 26 weeks, which of the following statements is true in this scenario?

Michael is no longer eligible for unemployment benefits

the ___ publishes extensive information on various occupations in different geographic areas. It is a major source of publicly available compensation data.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

in the negotiation stage of a multiyear wage contract, Mark, the manager of SifCo Corp., specifies that changes will be made to the wage based on the changes in the consumer price index and mentions the effective dates of adjustment. Which of the following types of clauses has Mark introduced in the contract?

Escalator clause

What are the behaviors that compensation needs to enforce?

First, compensation should be sufficiently attractive to make recruiting and hiring good potential employees possible (attraction). Second, compensation should be used to ensure that the good employees stay with the company (retention). It should also concentrate on further building employee knowledge and skills (develop skills). Compensation should motivate employees to perform well on their jobs- to take their knowledge and abilities and apply them in ways that contribute to organizational performance

Which of the following is an example of a bourse market?

Flatcake, a website that allows buyers to negotiate the prices with the sellers of handmade goods

Gramhold Inc., a pharmaceutical company, reduces its 10 salary grades to just three broad bands. Which of the following statements is most likely to be true in this case?

Gramhold will experience career moves within bands more than career moves between bands

Explain the coverage of the FMLA

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act applies to all employers having 50 or more employees and entitles all eligible employees to receive unpaid leave up to 12 weeks per year for specified family or medical reasons. To be eligible, an employee must have worked at least 1,240 hours for the employer in the previous year

Discuss the trends that are leading to the increased interest in variable pay

The greater interest in variable pay probably can be traced to two trends. First, the increasing competition from foreign produces forces American firms to cut costs and/or increase productivity. Second, today's fast paced business environment means that workers must be willing to adjust what they do and how they do it. Failure to adapt to new technologies, new work processes, and new work relationships could lead to possible layoffs and terminations. To avoid this scenario, compensation experts are focusing on ways to design reward systems so that workers will be able- and willing -- to move quickly into new jobs and new ways of performing old jobs. The ability and incentive to learn these come partially from reward systems that more closely link worker interests with the objectives of the company

List the basic components of the most executive compensation packages

There are five basic elements of most executive compensation packages. 1. base salary 2. short term (annual) incentives or bonuses 3. long term incentives and capital appreciation plans 4. employee benefits 5. perquisites

Which of the following is NOT true of merit bonuses?

They are more expensive than merit pay in the long run

Which of the following is an advantage of gain sharing plans?

They increase employees' knowledge of business

An ___ approach to compensation involves designing a total pay system at headquarters and applying it globally

exporter

a recent article analyzing the results from over 100 executive pay studies shows that the best predictor of executive pay, by far is, __

firm size

The ___ theory is the most influential in explaining the pay-level differences

human capitall

Pay ranges:

reflect the differences in performance or experience that an employer wishes to recognize with pay

When designing a sales compensation plan, it should be kept in mind that:

salespeople under an incentive system will view customer service as an imposition

which of the following statements about single rates is true?

single rates are usually specified for workers within a particular job classification

Compare risk-sharing and success-sharing plans

A success-sharing plan is a genetic category of pay add on (variable pay) which is tied to some measure of group performance, not individual performance. It is not a part of an employee's base pay. In these plans, employees share in any success- performance above standard- but are not penalized for performance below standard. A risk-sharing plan is also a generic category of pay add-on (variable pay). it differes from success sharing in that an employee not only shares in successes but is also penalized during poor performance years. Penalty is in form of lower total compensation in poor corporate performance years. Rewards, though, are typically higher than that for success sharing programs in high performance years. These plans pose greater risk than success sharing plans

when employee performance measures are ambiguous and vary from time to time, but the organization's performance is fairly stable over time, the most effective type of compensation is to offer ____.

A variety of rewards with significant incentive pay

Which of the following is an example of the sorting effect in action?

An employee leaving a high-paying job for one that provides more work/life balance

A ___ plan requires division of a task into simple actions and determination of the time required by an average skilled worker to complete each action

Bedeaux

which of the following is NOT true?

Companies are moving back to entitlement-oriented pay to reduce turnover

Explain the low-high approach in selecting jobs for inclusion in a compensation survey

If an organization is using skill-competency-based structures or generic job descriptions, it may not have benchmark jobs to match with jobs at competitors who use a traditional job-based approach. Market data must be converted to fit the skill or competency structure. The simpilist way to do this is to identify the lowest and highest paid benchmark jobs for the relevant skills in the relevant market and to use the wages for these jobs as anchors for the skill based structures. Work at various levels within the structure can then be slotted etween the anchors. For example, if the entry market rate for operator A is $12 per hour and the rate for a team leader is $42 per hour, the the rate for operator B an be somewhere between $12 and $42 per hour. The usefullness of this approach depends on how well the extreme benchmark jobs match the organization's work and whether they really do tap the entire range of skills.

Compare and contrast job analysis and job evaluation

Job analysis is a systematic process for gathering, documenting, and analyzing information in order to describe jobs. Job analysis describes job content, worker requirements, and working conditions. Job evaluation is used to systematically recognized differences in the relative worth among a set of jobs and establish pay differentials accordingly. HR professionals create internally consistent job structures through job analysis and job evaluation. Job analysis is a descriptive procedure, however job evaluation reflects value judgments. Through job analysis HR specialists write job descriptions that describe job duties and minimum qualifications requried of individuals to perform their jobs. Job evaluation reflects the values and priorities that management places on various positions

In gain-sharing plan formulas, ___ are in the numerator and ___ are in the denominator.

Labor inputs; productivity outcomes

When identifying what is important to employees, which theory would be most useful?

Maslow's need theory

The ___ minimizes the distortion of the central tendency caused by outliers

Median

Which of the following does NOT provide for incentives based on standards that are expressed in terms of time period per unit of production?

Merrick system

MayFly Inc., a firm headquartered in Paris, France, sends one of its employees to Frankfurt, Germany and Barcelona, Spain to manage its operations in these cities. The employee would be required to alternate between the two cities every six months. Mayfly offers only a moving expense on top of the base pay as the employee would be moving only within the European Union countries. Which of the following approaches to expatriate compensation is exemplified in this situation?

Modified balance sheet approach

Which of the following statements is true of pay level?

Pay level is directly proportional to labor costs

Which of the following is NOT a benefit that is required by statutory law?

Pension and retirement benefits

Who are special groups? What are the characteristics that special groups share?

Special treatment, either in the form of add-on packages not received by other employees or in the form of compensation components entirely unique in the organization, tends to focus on a few specific groups. The text argues that special groups share two characteristics. First, special groups tend to be strategically important to the company. If they don't succeed at their jobs, success for the whole organization is in jeopardy. Second, their positions tend to have built-in conflict, conflict that arises because different factions place incompatible demands on members of the group

Explain the differences between standard deviation and quartiles and percentiles

Standard deviation tells us how tightly all pay rates are clustered around the mean. As such, they show how similar or dissimilar the market rates are from each other. A small standard deviation means they are tightly bunched at center; a large standard deviation means rates are more spread out. Quartiles and percentiles order all data points from lowest to highest and then convert them to percentages. Quartiles are frequently used to set pay ranges or zones.

Components identified as vital to the success of both Scanion and Rucker plans are:

a productivity norm and effective norm and effective worker committees

The most obvious sorting factor is ___

ability

____ theory argues that performance-based pay is the optimal compensation choice for complex jobs, where monitoring employee performance is difficult

agency

the final major decision in pay-level determination is to ____.

design grades and ranges or bands

In recent years, some firms have tried to deal with the plateau effect and also accommodate the different career motivations of mature scientists and engineers through a __

dual career ladder

In the majority of the states, unemployment insurance is financed exclusively by:

employers that pay federal and state unemployment insurance

What is the difference between success sharing and risk sharing plans

in success sharing plans, employee base wages are constant and variable pay adds on during successful years. If the company does well, you receive a predetermined amount of variable pay. If the company does porrly, you simply forgo any variable play- there is no reduction in your base pay, though. In a risk sharing plan, base pay is reduced by some amount relative to the level that would be offered in a success sharing plan. At risk plans shift part of the risk of doing business from the company to the employee

At the time it is granted, which of the following has no tax implications for an executive?

incentive stock options

Hannah is the CEO of JF Corp., a steel manufacturing company. She finds that the market is exhibiting the signs of a maturing market. She wants to revise the compensation package for her sales employee to adapt to the changing market conditions. In this case, Hannah is most likely to:

increase base pay

Which of the following actions is most likely to be favored by unions?

introducing lump-sum awards

the pay policy that most closely associated with the decreased ability to attract employees is a ____ policy.

lag

A market pay line ___.

links a company's benchmark jobs with market rates paid by competitors

An indian citizen working for a Japanese company in India is a __

local country national

The __ component of executive compensation has grown the most since 2012

long term incentives

Describe the components of the affordable health care act

look up

In a hiring situation, consider that other potential costs will not change in the short run, the level of demand that maximizes profit is that level at which the _____ of the last hire is equal to the ___ for that hire.

marginal revenue;wage rate

___ is an individual level form of performance pay

merit bonus

What are the differences between pay grades and pay ranges?

pay grades group for pay policy application. Compensation professionals group jobs into pay grades based on similar compensable factors and job value. In other words, pay grades represent the horizontal dimension of pay structures. Pay ranges build upon pay grades by denoting the acceptable lower and upper bounds of pay for the jobs within particular pay grades. Pay ranges represent the vertical dimension of pay structures

the market pay rate is the

point at which supply and demand lines cross

The process of multiplying survey data by some factor judged to reflect the difference between a survey benchmark job and a company job is called ___

survey leveling

When taxes are deducted from employees' earning up to the same amount of taxes they would pay had they remained in their home country, it is known as __

tax equalization

___ puts a lid on the maximum pay level an employer can set.

the product market

A small lawn care company has two mowers and four employees. If it hires another employee and the factors of production remain the same, how will the productivity of the fifth employee compare to that of the current four employees?

the productivity will reduce

Executives, supervisors, and sales staff often receive special compensation treatment because __

these jobs face conflicting demands

Wage adjustments in multiyear contracts may be specified through all of the following ways EXCEPT ___

turnover clauses

In a __ pay plan, a contract is negotiated which specifies that employees hired after a given target date will receive lower wages than their higher seniority peers working on the same or similar jobs

two tier

The authors argue that for merit pay to live up to its potential, all of the following should be done EXCEPT:

using more peer raters than supervisor raters

____ is the value employee attach to the organization rewards offered for satisfactory job performance

valence

In the regression equation y=a+bx job evaluation points are denoted by __

x