IF you're suffering in silence because your employer failed . . . yet again . . . to recognise your talents with a pay increase, you may be like the 90% of employees who wrongly rate their performance as 'above average' and seek commensurate compensation. Undeserved, perhaps, but the payouts at work can become so arbitrary that deservedness is lost in the effort/reward balance we work by.

Or you may be a dynamo and just work in one of the many organisations whose performance system systematically fails to target rewards to the most effective people.

You may love the work, beat your competitors, outperform your colleagues and break records year on year, but if there is no carefully conceived and well executed enterprise strategy regarding pay, rewards, recognition, development opportunities and career advancement, you may be in for a long and bitter wait.

The stress of being the only one in a close-knit team to be rewarded is matched only by the sudden surge of pain brought about by not being rewarded at all. Both are followed closely by the anxiety of being the person doing the rewarding; deciding how the spoils are to be shared when your staff has met or more than met their target is fast becoming one of the toughest challenges for modern managers.

The problem with reward systems and their development and application is theoretical and practical; well-thoughtout and psychologically robust approaches to reward, which encompass the complexities and contradictions human beings are about, are rare.

Yet the employee groups seeking reward are not just processors or analysts or specialists or technicians or engineers; they're living organisms with very acute appraisal antennae propelled by the will to be recognised.

Even when there are reward systems in place which are robust, their application suffers from cronyism, favouritism, bias and bashfulness on the part of many managers who see only what they want to see, and recognise prejudicially those achievements which fit into their own personal agenda, are ignorant of the nuances of motivation and de-motivation or simply can't bear the stress of giving out the bonuses so give an equal yearly amount to everyone and avoid eye contact.

Companies promoting themselves as driven by performance appraisals and measurement models often don't close the circle with anything real regarding rewards.

Many performance models used in Irish workplaces are merely masquerading as performance-based. And are really all about surveillance.

A legitimate performance-appraisal system must have some reward embedded within it, so that high performance is as rewarded as low performance is correspondingly punished, while performing at an adequate level is left at the status quo.

Lately, rhetoric is exceeding the reality about performance issues and automatic tenure-based pay increases continue to co exist with so-called performance systems . . . or worse still, the personality preferences of people in power is the main determinant of who gets the pay rise and who lingers lonely on last year's level.

A recent study by the International Society of Performance Improvement (2006) indicates that properly done, tangible incentive programmes increase individuals' performance output by 20% and for teams, the increase is almost 40%, so money and other real reward systems work for most people, whether they know it or not.

It's how to set apart the peak achievers from the pack that causes strain for managers; and with an increasingly litigious employee body and need for managers to use robust decision models, even managers want to avoid falling victim to their own (manager) whimsy when sharing out the bonus bounty.

When the gestures of recognition are done, the drinks have been had or the cake consumed, the speeches made and slaps on the back given, bonus time is lingering and everyone wonders what will happen.

The implications of bonus payments and monetary reward systems are profound. Not only can companies create as many IR and conflict issues with one badly thought-out bonus payout, they can lose good people and make bad ones stick firmer still.