Stack overpay
I wonder if Nadalla's answer to the question might have something to do with Microsoft's (past?) culture of stack ranking? As I understand it, under MS' stack ranking system, your bonuses and pay raises are tied to your performance in the ranking. The idea being that, if you deserve a raise then "the system" will work that out automatically based on how well you do your job (or, more realistically, how well you can game the stack-ranking system).
So Nadalla might be correct when it comes to large companies which have "a system" in place, but being such a long-time Microsoft person, he may not have realised that most of the rest of the world isn't so algorithmically organised.