When the year 2006 is coming to an end, pay raise, promotion and yearly bonus have become the most popular words at this time. A survey done by the human resource website ChinaHR.com shows that when office workers feel that they are treated unfairly in the salary raise issue, nearly half (47.9%) of them will consider "looking for another job". About 43.1% of people interviewed choose to "talk about the issue directly with their company" and 3.2% just quit their jobs to express their disapproval. Only 5.8% of people will remain silent under this situation, the Economic Information Daily reported.

The survey also shows that 51.3% of the interviewees have never asked for a salary raise from their managers. Among the rest of the people who made the request, only 8.5% did get a higher pay while the rest of the 40.2% said the result "is not good."

When asked why they are unwilling to talk about the salary raise issue with their bosses, a high proportion (42.7%) of the people feared "they might feel upset if the boss turned down their request". Some 25.8% of the people feared "their self-assessments might differ from those given by their bosses." Twenty-two percent of the people take the wait-and-see attitude and 9.5% of the people, the least among the group, said they were afraid that "bosses might think they want to hop to another job."

Based on these findings, an expert from the website's human resource research center said that nowadays, as the salary, promotion and bonus issues are not transparent in most companies, staff members often find it difficult to know whether their work performances are directly related with their salaries. The problem revealed in this survey shows that employees do not have a clear idea of how much they have contributed to the company's core values, so they have to make conjectures and take a wait-and-see attitude. These attitudes will no doubt undermine the incentive functions of the company's schemes.