A significant and increasing number of North American organizations use tangible rewards to motivate their employees. Despite the widespread use of tangible rewards, there is limited understanding as to what makes them effective. Our study has two related purposes. First, we use a lab experiment...

In an environment where individual productivity can be increased through efforts directed at a conventional task approach and more efficient task approaches that can be identified through unconventional thinking, we examine the effects of productivity-target difficulty and pay contingent on...