The Demotivating Effect (and Unintended Message) of Retrospective Awards

Carly D. Robinson, Jana Gallus, Monica G. Lee and Todd Rogers
Additional contact information
Carly D. Robinson: Harvard U
Jana Gallus: UCLA
Monica G. Lee: Stanford U
Todd Rogers: Harvard U

Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government

Abstract: It is common for organizations to offer awards to motivate individual behavior, yet few empirical studies evaluate their effectiveness in the field. We report a randomized field experiment (N = 15,329) that tests the impact of two types of symbolic awards on student attendance: pre-announced awards (prospective) and surprise awards (retrospective). Contrary to our pre-registered hypotheses, prospective awards had no impact while the retrospective awards decreased subsequent attendance. Survey studies provide evidence suggesting that receiving retrospective awards may demotivate the behavior being awarded by inadvertently signaling (a) that recipients have performed the behavior more than their peers have; and (b) that recipients have performed the behavior to a greater degree than was organizationally expected. A school leaders survey shows that awards for attendance are common, and that the organizational leaders who offer these awards are unaware of their potential demotivating impact.

Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?Id=1681

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:ecl:harjfk:rwp18-020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().