03/06/2017

How Higher CEO Pay Can Impact an Organization

Be aware: Higher executive pay tends to make your organization a magnet for extra scrutiny

Association CEO compensation is up these days. That’s good news for execs, but it can have a broader ripple effect too.

Things are looking up for association executive pay. “CEO Salary Dynamics,” a new research paper from the ASAE Foundation and Naylor Association Solutions, reports that CEO compensation has swelled in the post-Great Recession years. From 2012 to 2016, according the report, the median CEO base salary has spiked a remarkable 33 percent, from $150,000 to $200,000. The growth is larger at trade associations (40 percent), but pretty much every category is on the upswing, whether the breakdown is by budget, staff size, or scope. Only associations with budgets below half a million dollars saw a decline between 2012 and 2016, and there the downturn is only one percentage point.

That said, some types of associations perform better than others in terms of executive pay: Salaries are robust in finance and manufacturing, softer in construction/housing and education. And the numbers are slightly more sober when the study is limited the 71 associations that participated in the ASAE Foundation’s compensation study in 2012, 2014 and 2016; there, the increases are more modest, with the median increase at nearly 17 percent across the four years.

Please click here to read the complete article from Associations Now.