Prof. Andrzej Falkowski of SWPS University in Warsaw said greater openness about pay, due from June, is likely to be a psychological shock for many employees.
In the short term, he said, comparisons between workers could increase tension, weaken job satisfaction and put managers under pressure to explain why one person earns more than another.
Falkowski sees the coming change as painful at first, but potentially healthy over time.
The early phase, he said, is likely to bring conflict, emotion, and a drop in satisfaction for some workers, before the labor market becomes more orderly and transparent.
Falkowski argued that people do not judge pay in absolute terms. What matters most, he said, is how their salary compares with the salaries of others around them.
“There are no objective evaluations of money,” he said. To illustrate the point, he referred to research involving graduates of Harvard Business School.
In those studies, he said, most respondents preferred to earn less in absolute terms if it meant earning more than their peers, rather than earning more overall while still trailing the people around them.
Falkowski said he often puts the issue to students in simple terms: would they rather earn USD 50,000 when others make USD 25,000, or USD 100,000 when others make USD 200,000? Most choose the first option, he said, because the relationship mattered more than the figure itself.
He said a similar pattern can be seen in the United States where pay data are public at some state universities.
At the University of Michigan, for example, one economist earned about USD 700,000 a year, while other professors in similar roles made around USD 200,000 to USD 250,000, Falkowski said.
Even when such differences can be justified formally, he added, they carry strong psychological weight.
Someone earning USD 200,000 does not necessarily feel highly paid, Falkowski said. That person may instead focus on the fact that a colleague earns three times more.
In his view, that is why pay disclosure can quickly stop being just information about money. It can become information about status, fairness and personal worth.