Alfred Adler, founder of the school of individual psychology, introduced the term compensation in relation to inferiority feelings. In This book he describes this relationship: If one feels inferior he usually tries to compensate for it somewhere else.
Adler's motivation to investigate this was from personal experience. He was a very sickly child. He was unable to walk till he was four because of rickets. Then he was a victim of pneumonia as well as a series of accidents.