I disagree strongly. Management has better things to do than push unasked-for money on employees, especially in a young company. An employee who wants more money can and should ask for it.
It creates a lot of unnecessary tension between management and employees if employees can't just assume that they'll be rewarded for outstanding results and don't have to ask for it. If there's a tacit agreement that if you do great work you'll get a raise with a quarterly or semi-annual review process, employees don't have to get distracted by thinking about when they should ask for a raise or whether they need to get a competing offer to get leverage to ask for a higher raise.
Management might have better things to do, but if this creates an atmosphere where employees feel under-appreciated, they'll leave, and this churn can really hurt the company, which makes it a huge problem for management that could have been avoided by rewarding high performing employees earlier.
I agree that there is a cultural bias in favor of this type of wage structure, and that any company that ignores it does so at their own risk, as it will create unnecessary tension, as you say.
But still I bristle at tacit assumption behind the OP's point that both the amount and timing of my wage increases should rest in the hand of a manager. The OP is saying that managers should be enlightened about it, and I'm saying you can't trust management to be enlightened about it and should take charge of your own compensation.
What about a mature company? What about to continue to keep their salary at what it was before, to combat inflation? What about if they honestly are doing well and deserve more money?
To expound upon the inflation bit. Whenever you do not give an employee a raise that matches inflation, you're decreasing his salary by decreasing its buying power.
My opinion is based on the notion that it is generally bad to cede control over your own interest. To wait for management to give you what you want rather than to simply ask for what you want is to cede responsibility for wage change to management, which will generally not be in the employee's best interest.
Another more practical problem with the OP's desire to abrogate responsibility for price-setting is that it is impossible to objectively gauge the value of an employee outside of the marketplace. That value is fundamentally determined by the marketplace, by who is willing to pay what for your efforts. As much as we'd like to, we cannot ignore the fact that price is determined by supply/demand even for our own work.
I believe that employees would be better served by accepting the reality of the basis of their wages rather than waiting for some sort of ill-defined "enlightened" management to give you "what you deserve".
As an employee, you want to take control over negotiating your own raises because that generally results in more money for you. In that sense, I agree with your posts.
As a manager, you want to move employees away from political behavior. Feelings of unfairness are a big demotivator, and if you wait for employees to ask for raises, then there will be very little correlation between competence and pay. Employees will find this out, and the result will be your employees focus on politics, feel like life is unfair, and in general will be less productive.
Can someone who's down-voted me on the parent message and other messages in this thread (-10 points total) please let me know why you've downvoted me? My position places a premium on personal agency even in the face of mismanagement and I'd argue it is principled, if unpopular. This entire thread is a matter of opinion, up to and including the OP, and I didn't realize that offering a dissenting opinion would occasion penalization. Or is downvoting a method of indicating disagreement?
Asking for more money is a much different thing than turning in your notice. Of course when you march into the boss's office and ask for more money you're sort of implying you might look elsewhere if they don't cough up the cash. But you're more likely to be labeled ambitious than disloyal, which is what happens to counter-takers.
