Can the Monetary Sentimental Value Resolve the Damage of Monetary Rewards to Work Engagement and Affective Organizational Commitment?

Abstract

Purpose: Monetary rewards have always been an effective incentive method for enterprises. However, with the advent of the post-pandemic era, working from home and online meetings have become the norm. Under epidemic prevention and control measures, employees are inevitably experiencing negative emotions and even psychological problems, which pose a challenge to the incentive effect of traditional monetary rewards. This article proposes the concept of monetary emotional value based on research related to emotional value and cognitive evaluation theory, and explores its improvement effect on the effectiveness of monetary rewards. Participants and Methods: A questionnaire survey was conducted on 538 employees from six state-owned enterprises in China, including Shanghai, Anhui, and Wuhan. In order to reduce the effects of common method biases and causal lag effect, this study is divided into three stages for data collection, with a time interval of half a month. The hypothesis test was carried out by hierarchical regression analysis, bootstrap and Johnson-Neyman method. Results: The results show that when the monetary sentimental value was high, the interaction between monetary rewards and monetary sentimental value had a strengthening effect on affective organizational commitment and work engagement; When the monetary sentimental value is low, the interaction between monetary rewards and monetary sentimental value has a weakening effect on affective organizational commitment and work engagement. This result confirms the role of monetary sentimental value, which can alleviate the negative impact of monetary rewards on affective organizational commitment and work engagement. Conclusion: This paper proposes the concept of monetary sentimental value, in response to Fletcher’s call to explore the carrier of sentimental value as the main research direction in the future, and expands the research content and application scope of sentimental value. Then, this paper reveals the guiding role of monetary sentimental value in the effectiveness of monetary rewards, which not only responds to Mickel’s viewpoint of neutrality in monetary rewards, but also enriches the connotation of the overall value of money. In addition, by verifying the positive role of monetary sentimental value in the process of influencing employees with monetary rewards, the understanding of the boundary conditions for the effectiveness of monetary rewards has been strengthened, providing some reference for organizations to implement monetary rewards more effectively.