Business consulting company, by nature of consultancy, should advocated and influence client to adapt advance business management methodology and practice. In reality, business consulting company also face difficulty in compensation system and performance management. Due to complexity of business consultancy, some of predicament remains unsolved and serious consideration should be given.
Compensation system for business consulting company usually includes two parts: base salary and project commission, the whole system should encourage team working and sustain customer satisfaction, should facilitating process of delivering value added high end consulting service, but its adaptability and flexibility meets with tremendous challenge. Especially, business project commission system, when apply to rewarding and designed inappropriately, it will damage both team working and customer satisfaction.
Used as material and pecuniary incentive, project commission system can really motivate team member, but side effect also emerging: it cultivates culture that incompatibly with nature of business consulting project whose essence is working and sharing, with selfishness interesting and materialistic incentive no one really want to sharing, which impairing foundation of consulting project and team working. Design with aim to motivate team member work harder and smarter during consulting project, and if not define appropriately, project commission system would produce disastrous outcomes. Due to nature of business consulting work, it can be every hard to distinguish between team members, so project commission usually awarded according their grade and seniority, which discouraged newcomers and really work hard members who contribute a lots in project. Working in obscure and between consulting company and client, there are huge room for project manager to take advantage of. Usually project commission is pay after successful closing of project. In order to get bonus, project manager sometimes misleading client and change scope of project and even avoid difficulty work which must be done according to contract.
Building on hypothesis of rational-economic man shortly after industrialization, commission system apply widely to all works of life for about two hundred years, but reality has changed since then, and the hypothesis should be verified and revised when use in nowadays business consulting industry. Generally speaking, project commission produce strong sense of inequity and discrimination, and in the end jeopardized productivity for whole business consulting industry.