Motivating Employees with Goal‐Based Prosocial Rewards*
研究对比了基于目标的亲社会奖励（捐赠给慈善机构）与现金奖励在不同目标难度下对员工努力的影响，发现亲社会奖励在容易和挑战性目标下更能激励员工，且目标难度与努力的关系更平缓。
ABSTRACT A recent trend in organizations is to motivate employees with goal‐based prosocial rewards, whereby employees must donate their rewards to charities upon goal attainment. We examine the motivational effects of goal‐based prosocial rewards versus cash rewards under different levels of goal difficulty. We develop our hypotheses based on affective valuation theory, which posits that when valuing uncertain outcomes by affect rather than calculation, individuals are largely insensitive to changes in probability of the outcomes, including probability of goal attainment. Experiment results support our hypotheses. Specifically, we find that employees who are rewarded with prosocial (vs. cash) goal‐based rewards are more likely to adopt an affective valuation approach. Consequently, when employees are assigned either an easy goal or a stretch goal, their effort is higher when incentivized with a goal‐based prosocial reward than a cash reward. Furthermore, there is a less curve‐linear relationship between goal difficulty and effort with prosocial (vs. cash) goal‐based rewards. These findings highlight for incentive system designers the motivational advantage of goal‐based prosocial rewards relative to traditional cash rewards. Furthermore, we extend the academic literature by showing how affect‐rich rewards such as prosocial rewards can influence employees' assessment of the probability of goal attainment.