Today’s small business environment is tough, highly competitive and more challenging than ever.

Originally Published By: Zoë B. CullenRicardo Perez-Truglia

Pay inequality is common in most workplaces. You get paid significantly more than your subordinates, your boss gets paid more than you, and your boss’s boss gets even more. In many large organizations, some employees can take home paychecks tens or hundreds of times more than others.

Whether you like it or not, your employees have wondered at some point about your salary — and their peers’. Should you be worried about that? Our recent research sheds light on this question, and our findings may surprise you.

We conducted an experiment with a sample of 2,060 employees from all rungs of a large commercial bank in Asia. The firm is quite representative of most companies around the world across some key dimensions, including its degree of pay inequality and non-disclosure policy around salary.