The Effects of Incentive Scheme and Task Difficulty on Employees' Altruistic Behavior Outside the Firm
实验研究企业日常任务的激励方案（锦标赛制与计件制）和任务难度如何交互影响员工在企业外的利他行为，发现锦标赛制在任务困难时更显著降低非获胜员工的利他行为，部分由过度权利感中介。
ABSTRACT 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.