Monetary incentives, motivational orientation and affective commitment in contact centers. A multilevel mediation model

Carlos-María Alcover, Maria José Chambel and Yolanda Estreder

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2020, vol. 81, issue C

Abstract: High quality contact and customer relationships are key services for all types of firms. To achieve this high quality performance standard, companies need highly motivated and committed employees, and human resources managers are responsible for designing and implementing practices capable of satisfying both economic exchanges and social exchanges in employee-organization relationships. The aim of this study is to analyze the relationships between monetary incentive expectation and affective commitment, in addition to the mediating role of motivation orientation in this relationship, in contact center employees. In particular, based on the social exchange theory (Blau, 1964), the social exchange model of Cropanzano and Mitchell (2005), and the self-determination theory (Deci, Olafsen, & Ryan, 2017), our study adopts a multilevel perspective to examine these relationships in a sample of 2367 contact center employees from 297 teams (3 or more members). The results showed that the level of performance-contingent rewards (team-level) guides the team’s autonomous motivation (team-level), which, in turn, fosters employees’ affective commitment (individual-level). The results have practical implications for human resource managers and for interventions aimed to promote contact center employees’ affective commitment, taking performance-contingent rewards into account.

Keywords: Affective commitment; Monetary incentives; Motivation; Contact centers; Social exchange (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487020300684
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:81:y:2020:i:c:s0167487020300684

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2020.102307

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().