The Effects of Incentive Scheme and Task Difficulty on Employees' Altruistic Behavior Outside the Firm

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Newman, Andrew H.; Tafkov, Ivo D.; Zhou, Flora Hailan
• 署名单位: University of South Carolina System; University of South Carolina Columbia; University System of Georgia; Georgia State University; Bentley University
• 刊物名称: CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTING RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0823-9150
• DOI: 10.1111/1911-3846.12567
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 1512-1535
• 关键词: psychological entitlement; performance compensation; Social comparisons; tournaments; feedback; PARTICIPATION; motivation; selection; contests; fairness

摘要

Employer-sponsored opportunities for altruism outside the workplace can improve employee engagement and passion within the firm, enhance the firm's corporate visibility, and improve its recruitment. There is limited understanding of whether and how a firm's management control system on employees' daily tasks can influence employee willingness to engage in altruism outside the workplace. In this study, we investigate via an experiment how the incentive scheme (tournament vs. piece rate) on employees' daily tasks interacts with the difficulty level of these tasks (low vs. high) to affect employees' altruistic behavior outside the firm. Our results indicate that, compared to a piece-rate scheme, a tournament scheme leads to a greater decrease in non-winning participants' altruistic behavior outside the firm when the original, incentivized task is more difficult compared to when it is less difficult. Consistent with our theory, participants' feelings of excessive entitlement partially mediate the interaction effect of incentive scheme and task difficulty on participants' altruistic behavior outside the firm. This study informs firms about how the design of its incentive scheme on employees' daily task inside the firm and the nature of that task can influence employee willingness to act altruistically outside the firm.