a generous commission arrangement means that employees often earn twice their salary in bonuses and,once in while,five times.Six people made as much in salary and commissions as the chairman did in his base salary, or roughly $500,000 each. These people all made much more than their managers and their managers' managers and virtually eve ryone else in the corporation except the top three or four officers, a situation that would have been impossible a few years ago Now such discrepancies cannot be prevented or kept quiet"People in the trade know perfectly well what's happening," the bank's senior administration executive told me. "They know the formula, they see the proxy statements, and they are busy check ing out the systems by which we and everybody else compensate these people." To avoid the equivalent of an employee run on the bank-with everyone trying to transfer to the brokerage operation-the corporation has ielt forced to establish performance bonuses for branch managers and some piece-rate systems for clerical workers, though these are not nearly as generous as the managers' extra earning opportunities
This system, though it solves some problems, creates others The executive responsible recognized that although these new income-earning opportunities were pegged to individual performance, people do not work in isolation.