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- February 2024
- Background Note
Frederick Herzberg on Motivating Employees
By: Willy C. Shih
This background note summarizes Frederick Herzberg's development of his motivation-hygiene theory, his theory regarding job enrichment, and how the theory has evolved. This is at the core of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Discerning Saints: Moralization of Intrinsic Motivation and Selective Prosociality at Work
By: Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees’ prosocial behavior. In the current research, we offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Better Keep the Twenty Dollars: Incentivizing Innovation in Open Source
By: Annamaria Conti, Vansh Gupta, Jorge Guzman and Maria P. Roche
Open source is key to innovation yet is assumed to be done largely through intrinsic motivation. How can we incentivize it? In this paper, we examine the impact of a program providing monetary incentives to motivate innovators to contribute to open source. The Sponsors... View Details
- 13 Sep 2023 - 15 Sep 2023
- Conference Presentation
An Intrinsic Motivation for Self-Orientation
By: Julian De Freitas, C Colas, T Mills, Laurie Paul, L. A. Paul and T. D. Ullman
- 2024
- Working Paper
Intrinsic Motivation and Referrals Within Firms: Evidence from a Large Microfinance Institution
By: Natalia Rigol and Benjamin N. Roth
Many organizations rely on internal referrals between employees with differing
comparative advantages. Yet when an employee encounters a lucrative opportunity,
they may be motivated to retain it even when doing so harms efficiency. We develop
a framework that... View Details
- Article
Forgoing Earned Incentives to Signal Pure Motives
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Edward H. Chang, Emma E. Levine, Katherine L. Milkman and Judd B. Kessler
Policy makers, employers, and insurers often provide financial incentives to encourage citizens, employees, and customers to take actions that are good for them or for society (e.g., energy conservation, healthy living, safe driving). Although financial incentives are... View Details
- Article
Valuing Time Over Money Predicts Happiness After a Major Life Transition: A Preregistered Longitudinal Study of Graduating Students
By: A.V. Whillans, Lucia Macchia and Elizabeth Dunn
How does prioritizing time or money shape major life decisions and subsequent well-being? In a preregistered longitudinal study of approximately 1000 graduating university students, respondents who valued time over money chose more intrinsically rewarding activities... View Details
- June 2018
- Article
The Power of Workplace Rewards: Using Self-Determination Theory to Understand Why Reward Satisfaction Matters for Workers Around the World
By: Anais Thibault Landry and A.V. Whillans
How can workplace rewards promote employee well-being and engagement? To answer these questions, we utilized self-determination theory to examine whether reward satisfaction predicted employee well-being, job satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, and affective... View Details
Keywords: Workplace; Rewards; Motivation; Employees; Satisfaction; Motivation and Incentives; Welfare
- December 2017
- Article
Discordant vs. Harmonious Selves: The Effects of Identity Conflict and Enhancement on Sales Performance in Employee-Customer Interactions
By: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Nancy Rothbard and Steffanie Wilk
Across multiple studies, we examine how identity conflict and enhancement within people affect performance in tasks that involve interactions between people through two mechanisms: role-immersion, operationalized as intrinsic motivation, and role-taking,... View Details
- September 2017
- Article
Winning the War for Talent: Modern Motivational Methods for Attracting and Retaining Employees
By: Anais Thibault-Landry, Allan Schweyer and Ashley V. Whillans
Given the struggle that many organizations face hiring and retaining talent in today's tight labor market, it is critical to understand how to effectively reward employees. To address this question, we review relevant evidence that explains the importance of workplace... View Details
- November 2016 (Revised December 2016)
- Module Note
Strategy Execution Module 12: Aligning Performance Goals and Incentives
By: Robert Simons
This module reading explains how managers use performance goals and incentives to ensure that employee actions align with the overall business strategy of the organization. The module begins by discussing how managers use goals to communicate business strategy, the... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
How Leaders Use Values-based Guidance Systems to Create Dynamic Capabilities
How do strategic leaders create change-adept organizations? Based on qualitative field research, this chapter argues that well-defined institutionalized purpose, values, and principles act as an organizational guidance system that integrates and strengthens the... View Details
- 2014
- Contribution
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation
By: Beth A. Hennessey, S. Moran, B.A. Altringer and Teresa M. Amabile
- May 2014
- Article
Representative Evidence on Lying Costs
By: Johannes Abeler, Anke Becker and Armin Falk
A central assumption in economics is that people misreport their private information if this is to their material benefit. Several recent models depart from this assumption and posit that some people do not lie or at least do not lie maximally. These models invoke many... View Details
- December 2012 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Rodan + Fields Dermatologists
By: Das Narayandas, Michael Roberts and Liz Kind
The case focuses on issues involved in managing the direct multilevel marketing sales consultants who sell R+F skin care products. The company is trying to better manage the inconsistent and highly variable recruitment behavior of the sales force i.e., the degree to... View Details
- January 2012
- Article
How Leaders Kill Meaning at Work
By: Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer
Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees in four avoidable ways. This article is based on analysis of hundreds of work diaries from professionals describing everyday events that... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-interested Charitable Behavior
By: L. Anik, L. B. Aknin, M. I. Norton and E. W. Dunn
While lay intuitions and pop psychology suggest that helping others leads to higher levels of happiness, the existing evidence only weakly supports this causal claim: research in psychology, economics, and neuroscience exploring the benefits of charitable giving has... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior
By: Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton and Elizabeth W. Dunn
While lay intuitions and pop psychology suggest that helping others leads to higher levels of happiness, the existing evidence only weakly supports this causal claim: Research in psychology, economics, and neuroscience exploring the benefits of charitable giving has... View Details
- May 2009
- Article
Authority versus Persuasion
This paper studies a manager's trade-off between using persuasion and using interpersonal authority to get an employee to 'do the right thing' from the manager's perspective (when the manager and employee disagree on the right course of action). It... View Details
- February 2009
- Article
Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting
By: Lisa D. Ordonez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky and Max H. Bazerman
Goal setting is one of the most replicated and influential paradigms in the management literature. Hundreds of studies conducted in numerous countries and contexts have consistently demonstrated that setting specific, challenging goals can powerfully drive behavior and... View Details