The Impact of Incentives on Interfunctional Relationship Quality: Views from a South African Firm

Abstract

Interfunctional relations and their impact on organizational performance have long been a concern of management and marketing scholars. Similarly, the use of incentives, and how they motivate individuals toward performance, has been a perennial focus of management researchers. Curiously, the effect of incentives on interfunctional relations has not received the same attention in the literature. The research in this paper sought to discover the extent to which the incentives an organization offers its personnel are perceived as being ‘fair’ by different functional groupings. The results of a study are presented in which the perceptions of a large sales function of the fairness of a series of incentives are compared with those of the rest of the organization. The implications of these findings for the quality of interfunctional relationships are discussed.