[sgtnoodle]

In my experience, a culture of radical employee-driven compensation transparency can lead to toxicity. A subset of folk have a tendency to become obsessed, and increasingly more resentful about their particular notion of fairness. Then from that, folk start to play the victim, grasping for explanations that don't require introspection or admitting individual responsibility. In that environment, the company is forced to take a defensive position, which makes the culture even more toxic.

What I've seen work well is the company taking pro-active steps to be transparent about compensation in aggregate. For example, HR can put out a periodic report documenting compensation metrics by job title and experience. They can also slice the data along various social factors to quantitatively show whether there's any indicators of unintentional bias. From there, another good idea is for the company to regularly apply adjustments independent from performance, in order to keep the metrics healthy.

[whiterknight]

Your first paragraph kind of describes employees behavior in general.