Incentives and motivation – new academic research

Incentive pay does not motivate all managers to perform, nor does it motivate in all business contexts, according to a study published in the Journal of Organizational Behaviour. The study examines how career ambition and a manager’s attention to tasks affect how they respond to performance pay.

Joyce Cong Ying Wang, co-author of the study, said:

‘We found that managers with higher career ambition will be more responsive to incentive pay by taking more risks. When managers are offered incentive pay, if they are very attentive to tasks, they will take more risks. They tend to invest more strategically, and they also are more likely to change strategies.’

‘An experimental study of the interaction effects of incentive compensation, career ambition, and task attention on Chinese managers' strategic risk behaviors’, by Daniel Han Ming Chng and Joyce Cong Ying Wang, Journal of Organizational Behaviour, 2015. For more information, please visit: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/job.2062/abstract