Purpose: A number of hospitality businesses are understaffed and are experiencing severe labor shortages, in various contexts. In many cases, hotels and restaurants are finding it difficult to retain and recruit motivated employees. In this light, this research uses key constructs related to the...

We evaluate a firm’s unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm’s "Discover Your Purpose" intervention among 2,976 white-collar employees...

Civil servants have a reputation for being lazy. However, people's personal experiences with civil servants frequently run counter to this stereotype. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive...

At the 2016 Academy of Management Conference, a group of distinguished compensation researchers held a panel discussion on the future of compensation research. Their remarks were compiled into an article published in this issue. Soon after the panel, Charles Fay commissioned a similar discussion...

Why do some leaders use praise as a means to motivate workers, while other leaders use social punishment? This paper develops a simple economic model to examine how leadership styles depend on the prevailing labor-market conditions for workers. We show that the existence of a binding wage floor...

According to psychologists and neuroscientists, a key source of intrinsic motivation is learning. An economic model of this is presented. Learning may make work less onerous, or the employee may value it in and of itself. Multitasking generates learning: performing one task increases...

In an attempt to determine what drives people to undertake a particular action, research, analytics and discussion on motivation continues. Decades of research and published studies has yet to bring forth a unified theory of motivation. In the last decade, serial research has brought about some...

Personalmanagement als Innovationsgenerator? Ja, und zwar nachweisbar in Euro! Gerade mittelstaendische Unternehmen sind auf ihre Innovationsfaehigkeit angewiesen, um sich im globalen Wettbewerb zu behaupten und langfristig zu ueberleben. Ob Unternehmen Innovationen erzeugen, ist jedoch in...