Search results

This paper aims to investigate the combined effect of two interventions, perspective taking and incentives, on auditors’ professional skepticism (hereafter skepticism) when auditing complex estimates. Specifically, this paper examines the different ways that perspective taking (management versus inspector) and incentives (absent versus reward versus penalty) combine to impact skepticism.

This paper uses an experiment with 177 experienced Big 4 auditors. The experiment used a 2 (management vs inspector perspective) × 3 (absent vs reward vs penalty incentives) between-subjects design.

In the absence of incentives, adopting a management perspective raises situational skepticism when measuring skepticism as appropriateness of management’s fair value estimate while adopting an inspector perspective raises situational skepticism when measuring skepticism as need for more evidence. The authors find some evidence that incentives complement perspective-taking by enhancing those aspects of skepticism for which perspective-taking performs poorly. When assessing management assumptions, auditors adopting an inspector perspective enhance their skepticism more substantially than those adopting a management perspective, and this enhancement is greater with rewards than with penalties. However, this study does not detect an interaction between incentive type and perspective-taking on auditor skepticism in relation to gathering additional evidence.

This paper extends the literature by shifting the focus from a single perspective to a comparison of two perspective-taking approaches and discusses how each of these approaches enhances different aspects of skepticism. This paper also illustrates the importance of the interplay between perspective-taking and incentives in enhancing auditor skepticism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of two key team‐based pay characteristics – namely reward allocation procedures (i.e. reward based on norms of equity, equality or some combination of the two) and incentive intensity – on both the amount and type of help given to one another among members of outcome‐interdependent teams.

A total of 180 undergraduate students participate in a laboratory simulation with a 2 × 3 experimental design. Servicing virtual “clients,” participants receive pre‐scripted requests for assistance from anonymous teammates. ANOVA and hierarchical regression analyses are used to test the hypotheses.

Relative to equity‐oriented group‐based pay structures, equality‐oriented pay structures are found to be associated with both significantly more help giving in general and more of the type of help likely to enhance group‐level competencies (i.e. autonomous help). Incentive intensity strengthens the effects of reward allocation on the amount (but not the type) of help giving.

While the short time frame of the simulation poses a significant threat to external validity, the findings suggest that team‐based compensation practices may provide organizational leaders with an important tool by which to shape critical, helping‐related team processes, with potentially important implications for both team learning and performance.

Managers interested in promoting capacity‐building and helping among team members should avoid allocating team rewards strictly on the basis of the individual contribution.

This paper provides the first empirical findings regarding how alternative modes of team‐based reward distribution may influence key group processes among members of outcome interdependent teams.

In the modern increasingly competitive milieu of cause marketing activities, both profit and nonprofit organizations expect their advocation of prosocial programs to gain the support of target customers. Previous research shows the effect from adding participant's personal attributes or social influence factors. This study considers the effects of benefit incentives and cost/reward influences to enhance prosocial behaviors.

Three between-subject experiments were conducted and SPSS Statistics ANOVA was employed to analyze the experimental results.

Rewarding time delays and prosocial efforts have no significant impact on the relationship between other-benefit incentives and willingness to engage in prosocial behaviors, but do significantly impact the self-benefit incentives condition. However, the negative effect of self-benefit condition can be mitigated by high rewards.

Since prosocial campaigns proposed by organizations in this study include both profit and nonprofit organizations, perhaps two category organization types should be attentively classified to evaluate the effects.

Under social marketing campaigns with self-benefit incentives conditions, the empirical findings of this study show that profit and nonprofit organizations can provide higher reward values to mitigate the adverse effects of high participating costs.

Social marketing campaigns with other-benefit incentives are less affected by high participating costs and highlight the value of altruism.

This study provides valuable suggestions for both profit and nonprofit organizations to use self-benefit/other-benefit incentives under cost related factors influence to encourage customers' prosocial behaviors.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the interrelationships between incentives and social media users’ intentions to like different brand-related social media content. The study is based on the uses and gratification (U&G) theory and investigates three types of incentives i.e. communal, self-interest, and reward incentives which act as antecedents of customers’ intentions to like three types of brand-related content (commercial messages, personal opinion messages, and lifestyle messages).

A data set of 415 effective responses was collected and structural equation modeling (SEM) was used for analyzing the data.

The obtained results indicate that communal and reward incentives enhance the intentions to like brand-related commercial, personal opinion, and lifestyle content. Self-interest incentives reduce the intentions to like three types of analyzed brand-related content with the strongest negative influence on intentions to like lifestyle content. Regarding the content type, the main drivers for liking lifestyle content and commercial content are reward incentives, whereas liking personal opinion content is mostly motivated by communal incentives.

This study provides valuable insights about users’ motivation to like brand-related content on social media with a focus on different types of brand-related content. The study has strong theoretical contributions as well as practical implications.

The paper seeks to provide recommendations for construction clients who design and implement financial incentive mechanisms (FIMs) on projects.

Four large Australian building projects commissioned by government clients under managing contractor contracts and completed between 2001 and 2005 were examined to explore the “drivers” that promoted motivation toward financial incentive goals. The results were triangulated across data sources, projects and stakeholder types.

FIM design should incorporate: flexibility to modify goals and measurement procedures over time; multiple goals covering different project areas; distribution of rewards across all the key organisations contributing to team performance (e.g. potentially not just the contractor, but the subcontractors and consultants) and a reward amount sufficient to be valued by potential recipients. FIM benefits are maximised through the following complementary procurement initiatives: equitable contract risk allocation; early contractor involvement in design; value‐driven tender selection; relationship workshops; and future work opportunities.

This paper provides practical recommendations to industry and hence does not emphasise theoretical aspects.

The uptake of these recommendations is likely to increase the impact of FIMs on motivation and improve project and industry outcomes. Although the study focuses on government clients of building projects, all the recommendations would seem to apply equally to private‐sector clients and to non‐building projects.

In order to improve motivation and reward high performance, clients are increasingly using FIM in their construction contracts. Despite the rising use of financial incentives, there is a lack of comprehensive construction‐specific knowledge available to help clients maximise outcomes. The study addresses this gap in the literature.

This paper examines an apparent contrast in organizing innovation tournaments; seekers offer contestant-agnostic incentives to elicit greater effort from a heterogeneous pool of contestants. Specifically, the study tests whether and how such incentives and the underlying heterogeneity in the contestant pool, assessed in terms of contestants' entry timing, are jointly associated with contestant effort. Thus, the study contributes to the prior literature that has looked at behavioral consequences of entry timing as well as incentives in innovation tournaments.

For hypothesis testing, the study uses a panel dataset of submission activity of over 60,000 contestants observed in nearly 200 innovation tournaments. The estimation employs multi-way fixed effects, accounting for unobserved heterogeneity across contestants, tournaments and submission week. The findings remain stable across a range of robustness checks.

The study finds that, on average, late entrant tends to exert less effort than an early entrant (H1). Results further show that the effort gap widens in tournaments that offer higher incentives. In particular, the effort gap between late and early entrants is significantly wider in tournaments that have attracted superior solutions from several contestants (H2), offer gain in status (H3, marginally significant) or offer a higher monetary reward (H4).

The study's findings counter conventional wisdom, which suggests that incentives have a positive effect on contestant behavior, including effort. In contrast, the study indicates that incentives may have divergent implications for contestant behavior, contingent on contestants' entry timing. As the study discusses, these findings have several implications for research and practice of managing innovation tournaments.

The ongoing debate about the effects of bonuses on managers’ performance and the role of reward systems in organizations has still not led to a unanimous conclusion among academics and practitioners. Those in favor of bonuses state that applying bonuses and putting emphasis on monetary rewards increases productivity and organizational performance, while those against bonuses claim that use of bonuses and monetary rewards leads to counterproductive results. A key question often overlooked in the discussion is: How important is handing out bonuses for an organization to become and stay successful for a longer period of time? This paper seeks to address these issues.

This paper describes the results of research into the characteristics of “high performance organizations” (HPOs) and the role of bonuses and reward systems in creating and maintaining HPOs.

The research results show that use of bonuses or implementation of certain types of reward systems have neither a positive nor a negative effect on organizational performance. This may be explained by the fact that reward systems are a hygiene factor for an organization. If an organization does not have an appropriate reward system (whether or not including bonuses), it will run into trouble with its employees and have difficulty improving its performance. If it does – a situation which employees expect and consider to be normal – it can start working on becoming an HPO.

The results of this study further the discussion about the role of bonuses.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the use of money, social recognition, and feedback have a similar impact on employee performance in the context of a modern Korean broadband internet service firm.

The study design was a quasi‐field experiment (with control group). First, the leaders of this Korean firm were trained in behavioral performance management. Following the steps of organisational behaviour modification (O.B. Mod.) they identified, measured, and analyzed critical performance behaviors and then intervened with the following reward incentives: money (n=38), social recognition and caring attention (n=41), and objective feedback only (n=31). The main dependent variable was overall performance, and this was also broken down into quantity and quality dimensions.

As hypothesized, money and social recognition had a significant impact on performance outcomes, but feedback did not result in as strong a result. When compared to the control group (n=23), all three reward incentives showed significantly more improvement of overall performance. These findings also indicated, as hypothesized, that the impact of this behavioral management approach on Korean employees did not appear as robust as previous meta‐analytic research based on samples of US employees. Finally, although in the predicted direction, the hypothesis that social recognition would have a relatively stronger impact than money and feedback in this context was not statistically supported.

The major limitation concerns generalizability of the findings. However, the experimental design provides support for internal validity.

The study results have practical implications for the value of behavioral performance management, but also that cultural contingencies should also be considered for successful application.

This study contributes preliminary evidence for O.B. Mod to have applicability across cultures.

Notes the attempts by many companies today to identify innovative compensation strategies that are directly linked to improving organizational performance. Observes that there are many approaches to incentive compensation such as cash bonuses, stock purchase and profit sharing. Examines the individual and group incentive concepts that reward performance based on predetermined organizational goals and metrics, several behavioural theories that can be associated with reward and compensation, and convergent and divergent views and conclusions from the business community.

The purpose of this paper is to compare effects of different monetary team‐based reward strategies on performance, pay satisfaction, and communication behavior in computer‐mediated groups.

In a laboratory experiment, 32 groups of undergraduate students, each consisting of three individuals, interacted electronically and performed a consensus‐reaching task. Team‐based incentives were distributed either equally (each team member received an equal share) or equitably (each team member's share depended on her/his individual contribution). A control group received no team‐based (or other) incentives.

Hierarchical multilevel analyses revealed that both types of team‐based rewards increased team members' motivation and pay satisfaction compared to the control condition. Moreover, the effects of team‐based rewards on performance were moderated by group members' assertiveness. In addition, team‐based rewards lead to more cooperative and task‐oriented communication in the computer‐mediated groups. Finally, equally divided rewards led to higher pay satisfaction on average than equitably divided incentives.

On a research level, this study shows that team‐based rewards have positive effects not only on performance but also on communication behavior in computer‐mediated groups. As a practical implication, reward effects should be considered cautiously as they might be influenced by team members’ personality. Moreover, whereas no major differences were found between equity and equality principles in terms of performance, the latter seems to be preferable when satisfaction is a major issue in virtual teams.