With or against others? Pay-for-Performance activates aggressive aspects of competitiveness

ABSTRACT

While paying employees for performance (PfP) has been shown to elicit increased motivation by way of competitive processes, the present paper investigates whether the same competitive processes inherent in PfP can also encourage aggressiveness. We tested our hypothesis in three studies that conceptually build on each other: First, in a word completion experiment (N = 104), we find that PfP triggers the implicit activation of the fighting and defeating facets of competitiveness. Second, in a multi-source field study (N = 94), co-workers reported more interpersonal deviance from colleagues when the latter received a performance bonus than when they did not. In our final field study (N = 286), we tested the full model, assessing the effect of PfP and interpersonal deviance mediated by competitiveness: Employees with a bonus self-reported higher interpersonal deviance towards their co-workers, which was mediated by individual competitiveness. These findings underscore that PfP can entail powerful yet widely unstudied collateral effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Pay for performance
• interpersonal deviance
• competitiveness
• word completion task

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We wrote a syntax that would identify if a correct target or non-target word was entered. We pre-programmed our syntax so that it covered all common and possible non-target words. After each pilot study, we added other non-target words to the original syntax so that it would “learn” to analyse the participants’ inputs automatically. Of course, we repeated the manual control steps in the final study to ensure that any other possible words were covered.

2. Gender has an effect on competitiveness (b =.29, SE =.14, p = .042) that is separate from the effect of PfP on competitiveness (b =.26, SE =.14, p = .056). Furthermore, age has a small effect in the mediation model (b =−.01, SE =.00, p = .069), but the effect of competitiveness on interpersonal deviance remains (b =.07, SE =.03, p = .028). Tenure has no effect on competitiveness or interpersonal deviance. PfP bonus size has no effect on competitiveness or interpersonal deviance, and does not change the shape of the indirect mediating effect.