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Many companies use competition for either monetary or non-monetary rewards to induce employee effort. Pitting employees against each other in a competition could come at a thus far insufficiently considered cost of leading to lower employee cooperation. The authors examine how competition for monetary rewards in the form of tournament incentives or non-monetary rewards in the form of standing in uncompensated public rankings affects employee cooperation with former competitors in a subsequent task where the extent of the cooperation does not affect the welfare or social standing of the person deciding to cooperate. The authors hypothesize that competition in the first task negatively affects cooperation in the second task. The authors further predict that competition leads to psychological pressure, which mediates differences in cooperation. The results support the authors’ hypotheses. In addition, the authors find that the decrease in cooperation results from the behavior of low performers, whereas cooperation by high performers is not affected. The findings are important because they show that inducing effort in one dimension leads to an unintended cost in the form of lower cooperation in another dimension. This cost occurs for both types of competition – competition for monetary payoffs and for non-monetary rewards. Ultimately, the size of this cost depends on the marginal benefit from any cooperation of low performers.

Performance feedback about whether responses are correct or incorrect provides valuable information to help guide learning. Although feedback itself has no extrinsic value, it can produce subjective feelings similar to “rewards” and “punishments.” Therefore, feedback can play both an informative and a motivational role. Over the past decade, researchers have identified a neural circuit that processes reward value and promotes reinforcement learning, involving target regions of dopaminergic input (e.g., striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Importantly, this circuit is engaged by performance feedback even in the absence of reward. Recent research suggests that feedback-related brain activity can be modulated by motivational context, such as whether feedback reflects goal achievement, whether learners are oriented toward the informative versus evaluative aspect of feedback, and whether individual learners are motivated to perform well relative to their peers. This body of research suggests that the brain responds flexibly to feedback, based on the learner’s goals.

Crowdsourcing initiatives, especially the format of idea and research contest have provided companies with unique and inventive opportunities to capitalize on users’ innovative potential and knowledge. Inspired by the potential, nonprofits are beginning to use the principles of crowdsourcing to develop better solutions for social problems. This research aims to enhance our knowledge on crowdsourcing for social innovation. Since the crowdsourcing initiative hinges on individuals' willingness to participate in these projects and their motivation to contribute valuable insights and ideas, we introduce a new framework that aligns participants’ motives with potentially offered incentives. The conducted empirical study at the ScrapLab design contest finds that participants indeed differ in their preferred incentives. It shows that participants not only strive for monetary but also nonmonetary incentives such as an internship, a party with friends, or the support of a social project, once they can choose. The results further highlight, that those participants, differing in their incentive preference, also show different types of contribution behavior. Our research contributes to a better theoretic understanding of the impact of various incentive structures on contribution behavior. From a managerial perspective, it provides guidance in adopting prize structures to justify participation and contribution behavior in crowdsourcing initiatives.

The aim of this research was to identify the importance of trust as a determinant of participants’ behaviour and the weight of different motivational factors that enhance the amount and the quality of contribution.

Quantitative research methods (online survey of 450 respondents and content analysis of 250 reviews) were applied on a Romanian crowdsourcing platform founded in 2008, with the mission to help potential tourists to take the most informed decision in their travel choices.

The data collected showed that the majority of the active members have a positive outlook over their experience within the community, admitting its trustworthy characteristics. The findings show that most of the top-rated members of the community were not motivated by material rewards such as money or prizes, but rather by socially related factors or by individual factors (positive feedback through comments or acquiring knowledge).

The findings cannot be generalised to other crowdsourcing models, which are subject to different task designs, outcomes, local contexts and even functionalities.

The results of this research can contribute to the design and implementation of customer-centred platforms, which might represent a way of development of organisational communication in the future.

The research posits that individuals’ experience within colloraborative crowdsourcing communities needs to be meaningful, as participants act based on a reciprocity norm, of giving something back to the community which is useful for fulfilling their own information-seeking purposes.

This chapter aims to examine the introduction and development of the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within a Chinese social, cultural, and political context. It mainly looks at the CSR movement in China in order to explain how the traditional values of Confucianism contributed to the development of CSR discourse which is similar to and differs from some other countries in North America and Europe.

The chapter is primarily theoretical in perspective. It also adopts a discourse approach, specifically Fairclough’s three-step approach by drawing upon a large state-owned corporate group’s website documents and interview data in order to create new meanings of Chinese CSR shaped by Confucian moral philosophy.

The chapter argues that development of Chinese CSR theory incorporates a revival of Confucian moral philosophy into modern Western business management philosophy. It demonstrates a hybrid model for CSR practices which combine aspects of both Confucian business ethics and Western CSR theory.

The research results are valid for state-owned enterprises and may not be generalized to other types of Chinese businesses such as private-owned enterprises and small business enterprises. Further research is needed to develop comparisons.

The chapter suggests a people-oriented leadership style which emphasizes the importance of people in the organization and is proven to be successful in the improvement of employee well-being and organizational productivity.

The originality of introducing interview data offers a benchmark for the study of CSR discourse in Chinese context. The chapter also provides a guide for business managers to design the strategies based on their own countries’ cultural, political, social, and institutional framework.

A work orientation represents a person’s beliefs about the meaning of work – the function work plays in the person’s life and the constellation of values and assumptions the person holds about the work domain. Research has suggested that adults tend to favor one of three primary work orientations: job, career, or calling. Empirical studies have shown that adults with different primary work orientations tend to experience different work and career outcomes; however, scholars have not analyzed how or why an individual first develops a work orientation. In this study, we take a first step toward investigating the origins of adults’ work orientations.

We propose hypotheses drawing on extant literature on the development of work values and occupational inheritance. We test hypotheses using a retrospective research design and survey methodology, with a sample of working adults.

Work orientations are developed through socialization processes with parents during adolescence. There are different patterns of development across the three work orientation categories: stronger calling orientations are developed when both parents possess strong calling orientations; stronger career orientations develop in accordance with fathers’ career orientations; and job orientations are related more to the nature of the adolescent’s relationship with parents than with parents’ own work orientations.

This research provides the first empirical study of the origin and development of work orientations.

This research offers insight into ways generations are connected through the perceived meaning of their work, even as the nature of work changes. We encourage future scholars to use this as a starting point for research on the development of work orientations, and to continue exploring these questions using additional methods, particularly longitudinal study designs.