Show Me the Money! Supply and Demand Misalignment for Tangible Rewards in Business*

Abstract

In incentive contracts, supervisors often set targets for employee performance, while employees decide the effort they are willing to exert to meet the target and earn the incentive. Both supervisors and employees make judgments about the value of incentives in terms of effort required or expended. Recent research on incentive types investigates employee effort in response to tangible and cash rewards under the premise that they may be valued differently by employees. We extend this research by investigating whether supervisors and employees make different effort-related decisions in response to tangible and cash rewards. Specifically, relying on construal-level theory, we predict that supervisors will favor tangible rewards relative to cash more than employees will. We conduct a lab experiment where we ask participants to take the role of either supervisor or employee. We manipulate the reward type (tangible or cash) and measure how much work supervisors demand and employees are willing to provide to obtain the reward. As predicted, we find that the tangible rewards, relative to cash, increase supervisors' target setting significantly more than employee effort levels. Our results offer implications for real-world incentive compensation design.