It’s (Not) All About the Jacksons
通过在高科技制造工厂的实地实验，研究了现金、餐券和口头奖励三种短期奖金对员工生产力的影响，发现非货币奖金略优于货币奖金，且货币奖金取消后生产力下降，但员工自选现金时负面影响减弱。
The use of short-term bonuses to motivate employees has become an organizational regularity, but a thorough understanding of the relationship between these incentives and actual performance is lacking. We aim to advance this understanding by examining how three types of bonuses (cash, family meal voucher, and verbal reward) affect employees’ productivity in a field experiment conducted in a high-tech manufacturing factory. While all types of bonuses increased performance by over 5%, nonmonetary short-term bonuses had a slight advantage over monetary bonuses. In addition, the removal of the bonuses led to decreased productivity for monetary bonuses but not for the verbal reward. However, this negative effect of monetary short-term bonuses diminishes when a cash bonus is chosen by employees rather than granted by default. Theoretical implications about the effect of short-term bonuses on intrinsic motivation and reciprocity, as well as practical applications of short-term bonus plans that stem from our findings, are discussed.