The sorting benefits of discretionary adjustment to performance-based pay

We use an experiment to test the hypothesis that adding discretionary adjustment to performance-based pay strengthens the sorting of employees based on how strongly they identify with the organization’s objectives. Our conceptualization of identification is grounded in identity economics, which predicts that employees who identify strongly with the organization’s objectives exert greater effort toward those objectives than employees who identify weakly with those objectives. Building on this conceptualization, we expect that employees anticipate that managers will adjust performance-based pay more (less) favorably when employees reveal strong (weak) identification with the organization’s objectives. Thus, when managers can adjust performance-based pay, performance-based pay contains a feature that benefits (disadvantages) employees with strong (weak) identification, which we expect to strengthen the sorting of employees based on their identification. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that the difference in preferences for performance-based pay between employees with strong and weak identification is larger when discretionary adjustment accompanies performance-based pay than when it does not. Our results also confirm that employee identification increases employee costly effort exertion toward the organization’s objectives. We contribute to the management accounting literature on discretion in performance evaluation by documenting a previously undocumented benefit of discretionary adjustment.