Organizational Control and Work Effort – Another Look at the Interplay of Rewards and Motivation

Abstract

Providing rewards is a central element of organizational control systems. However, the literature is hardly helpful from a practitioner's perspective: it typically focuses on monetary rewards at the expense of non-monetary, affiliative rewards, and yet researchers disagree over the usefulness of the prior ones. Some scholars claim that monetary rewards merely replace task-related ('intrinsic') motivation by reward-induced external pressure ('extrinsic' motivation). Empirical findings are mixed, partially given the different conceptualizations of intrinsic motivation. We shed more light on the impact of both monetary and non-monetary, affiliative rewards on the willingness to exert work effort and a potential detrimental interaction with different forms of intrinsic motivation. Our experimental results suggest that monetary and affiliative rewards have different effects: affiliative rewards clearly have beneficial effects, whereas the picture for monetary rewards is more nuanced than typically assumed in literature.

The psychological effects of centrality bias: an experimental analysis

“…According to Gagné and Forest (2008), compensation systems represent one of these contextual factors. In particular, the provision of rewards may derogate the feeling of autonomy as they put individuals under pressure to achieve a particular target and make them feel restricted in their decision-making about which actions need to be performed (Deci and Ryan 2000;Kunz and Linder 2012). At the same time, such rewards positively impact the feeling of competence as they imply feedback on an individual's task performance and goal attainment (Deci et al 2001;Gagné and Forest 2008).…”

“…As other types of experiments, vignette experiments reveal a high degree of internal validity, as the experimenters have control over the variables (Birnberg et al 1990). However, vignette experiments do not capture the participants' actual behaviour, but their behavioural intentions (Kunz and Linder 2012). Therefore, vignette experiments appear particularly applicable to studies that intend to assess unobservable measures such as intentions and attitudes (Aguinis and Bradley 2014;Kunz and Linder 2012).…”

“…However, vignette experiments do not capture the participants' actual behaviour, but their behavioural intentions (Kunz and Linder 2012). Therefore, vignette experiments appear particularly applicable to studies that intend to assess unobservable measures such as intentions and attitudes (Aguinis and Bradley 2014;Kunz and Linder 2012). Hence, the vignettes are complemented by a questionnaire that captures these intentions and attitudes.…”

“…Similarly as in Kunz (2015) and Kunz and Linder (2012), the participants read the description of a hypothetical work situation and were asked to decide about the degree of additional work effort she or he is willing to exert. The work situation stated that the participant worked as a consultant who was engaged in a management accounting project along with the project manager and four further consultants with a similar working experience as the participant was assumed to have (see the Appendix for the full text).…”

The Role of Human Resource Management (HRM) for the Implementation of Sustainable Product-Service Systems (PSS)—An Analysis of Fashion Retailers

“…Employees that undertake interesting tasks are already autonomously motivated which makes both monetary or nonmonetary incentives redundant to foster their motivation [202,203]. Rewards can even have an adverse effect and reduce employees' intrinsic motivation because they can be perceived as a signal that the task or function is unappealing since otherwise no incentive would be needed [201,204,205]. One explanation for the results of this study could be that most PSS providers have a traditional manufacturing background and still run a production-focused business model as their core business but have founded a separate unit for PSS [60,206].…”