The Finite Increment Faculty Merit Pay Allocation Model.
Department heads, deans and faculty have for years struggled to achieve a fair and equitable allocation of merit pay. This problem has also received national attention [22]. Recently, United States political leaders have expressed their concern about the need to encourage and reward excellence in the field of education. In addition, the trend at institutions of higher learning is in the direction of greater use of merit pay for salary adjustments [21]. As one would surmise, therefore, much literature has been devoted to the process of evaluating faculty performance for the purposes of tenure, retention and promotion, and merit. There are essentially two types of studies that have been devoted to the foregoing: (a) those that focus primarily on performance measurement [2, 6, 8, 10, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31], and (b) those that utilize single equation regression analysis or other analytical techniques to determine factors that may explain salary differentials [16, 17, 20, 34, 38, chap. 2; 39]. Performance measurement is obviously necessary in conjunction with renewal and tenure decisions, promotion decisions, and distribution of merit increases. Articles regarding performance evaluation examine the relevance of particular criteria, the weighting of such crite-