Organizational Control and Work Effort – Another Look at the Interplay of Rewards and Motivation

Providing rewards is a central element of organizational control systems. However, the literature is hardly helpful from a practitioner’s perspective: it typically focuses on monetary rewards at the expense of non-monetary, affiliative rewards, and yet researchers disagree over the usefulness of the prior ones. Some scholars claim that monetary rewards merely replace task-related (“intrinsic”) motivation by reward-induced external pressure (“extrinsic” motivation). Empirical findings are mixed, partially given the different conceptualizations of intrinsic motivation. We shed more light on the impact of both monetary and non-monetary, affiliative rewards on the willingness to exert work effort and a potential detrimental interaction with different forms of intrinsic motivation. Our experimental results suggest that monetary and affiliative rewards have different effects: affiliative rewards clearly have beneficial effects, whereas the picture for monetary rewards is more nuanced than typically assumed in literature