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Incentives are effective at enhancing productivity, but research also suggests that performance incentives can have “unintended negative consequences” including increases in hazard/injuries, increases in errors, and reduction in cooperation, prosocial behaviors, and creativity. Relatively overlooked is whether, when, and how incentives can be designed to prevent such negative consequences. The authors review literature in several disciplines (construction, healthcare delivery, economics, psychology, and [some] management) on this issue. This chapter, in toto, sheds a generally positive light and suggests that, beyond productivity, incentives can be used to improve other outcomes such as safety, quality, prosocial behaviors, and creativity, particularly when the incentives are thoughtfully designed. The review concludes with several potential fruitful areas for future research such as investigations of incentive-effect duration.

In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.

This paper aims to examine the economic and psychological mechanisms in turnover at the managerial level. The paper investigates how (1) the ease of moving posed by alternative jobs (i.e. the economic mechanism) and (2) the desire to move due to low job satisfaction (i.e. the psychological mechanism) simultaneously influence top management team (TMT) turnover and these managers' subsequent job position and pay.

Using 25 years of panel data on more than 2,000 top managers in the United States, the paper utilizes fixed-effects logistic regressions and the ordinary least squares model to test the hypotheses.

The authors find that CEO awards (an economic mechanism) and low compensation (a psychological mechanism) independently have positive effects on turnover. Turnover due to the economic mechanism leads to a higher position and pay, whereas turnover due to the psychological mechanism does not guarantee the same outcome. Further, when examining how pay dissatisfaction influences turnover simultaneously with CEO awards, the authors find that managers with the highest pay leave their firm, and not those with the lowest pay.

The paper employs the pull-and-push theory in the employee turnover literature and applies it to the top management team literature. By doing so, this paper contributes original insights to how economic and psychological mechanisms simultaneously affect managerial turnover and its subsequent outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the field’s understanding of how to raise individual innovation. Specifically, the authors aim to contribute to an understanding of the interplay of job characteristics and intrinsic motivation for individual innovation.

The study uses time-lagged survey data of a public service organization in Belgium. The analyses are based on more than 80 jobs and more than 1,000 employees. Hierarchical linear modeling was adopted to test cross-level hypotheses.

Innovation requirements influence individual innovation efforts by psychologically empowering employees, but the extent to which psychological empowerment translates into individual innovation depends on job complexity.

A more nuanced understanding is developed of when innovation requirements empower individual innovation, by acknowledging the role of job complexity in this relationship. The current findings contribute to a multilevel integrative understanding of the interplay of the job context and intrinsic motivation.