Key insights for leaders
- Job evaluation is a leadership responsibility, not just a technical task. It shapes fairness and legitimacy over time.
- Perceived fairness drives behaviour: when job evaluation is understood and trusted, engagement and collective effort rise.
- A clear job evaluation framework offers stability, ensuring consistent decisions and reducing perceptions of arbitrariness.
- With increased transparency, leaders are expected to explain and support how job value is assessed and rewarded.
- Maintaining equity requires a strategic approach, balancing structural, adaptive, and transformational evaluation choices rather than relying on isolated adjustments.
Many organisations underestimate the impact of job evaluation on daily decisions—until fairness is questioned, trust erodes, or performance declines. Job evaluation is often seen as a technical HR process, revisited only during pay disputes, compliance issues, or organisational changes. In reality, it sets the rules for fairness, credibility, and long-term performance. Like chess, success comes from how decisions are structured and sequenced over time.
In chess, no single piece determines the outcome. Success depends on understanding each piece's role, knowing when to stabilise the board, absorb complexity, experiment, and transform—while protecting the conditions that allow the game to continue. Organisations face a similar challenge in governing job value.
Why job evaluation is crucial
At its core, job evaluation determines the relative value of jobs based on their content, responsibilities, and contribution to the organisation. Its goals—internal equity, coherent pay structures, and alignment with labour markets—are well established. What's often underestimated is the direct link between job evaluation and organisational performance.
Research in organisational psychology, notably Equity Theory, shows that performance is shaped by perceptions of fairness. Individuals assess the balance between what they contribute and what they receive, relative to others. When perceived inequities arise, motivation declines, trust erodes, and collective performance suffers.
Recent research by us on the psychology of incentives (2024) supports this: perceived fairness is a more powerful and lasting driver of engagement than financial incentives alone. When people understand why jobs are valued differently—and see the system as coherent and transparent—frustration decreases and collective effort increases.
From this perspective, job evaluation isn't an administrative constraint. It's a foundation for high performance. Structure and clarity don't inhibit performance; they enable it. This applies to both public institutions and private companies.
This dynamic is amplified by a shift towards transparency. What was once an HR 'black box' is now scrutinised by employees, social partners, regulators, and the public. Organisations are increasingly challenged not only on pay outcomes but on the rationale behind them. In this environment, job evaluation can't be left solely to HR. It's a matter of governance—and leadership.
From static frameworks to strategic moves
The main challenge organisations face today isn't the lack of job evaluation methods. It's the absence of a shared logic for how evaluation decisions are made, adjusted, and justified over time.
Jobs evolve continuously. New roles emerge. Responsibilities shift incrementally. Local adaptations accumulate. Yet job evaluation is often treated as a one-off exercise, rather than a system that must be actively governed.
The chess analogy offers a way forward—not as a metaphor for complexity, but as a grammar of organisational moves. In chess, different pieces serve different purposes. Some provide structure. Others absorb complexity. Others explore uncertainty. One protects the continuity of the game itself. Job evaluation operates in the same way.
Playing the long game
Job evaluation is often revisited under pressure: regulatory scrutiny, social conflict, or pay disputes. Leaders who approach it this way miss its strategic potential.
Seen differently, job evaluation is one of the few mechanisms through which organisations can translate structure into fairness—and fairness into collective performance. It requires orchestration: knowing when to stabilise, when to adapt, when to experiment, and when to transform at scale, while never losing sight of equity as the condition for continuity.
In an era of growing transparency and rising expectations, leadership ownership of job evaluation is no longer optional. Organisations that treat it as a living system—rather than a static classification—build credibility, strengthen trust, and outperform over time.
In that sense, job evaluation isn't about winning a single move. It's about sustaining a coherent strategy, in service of both equity and organisational performance.