Group Incentives Research Articles

Individual Employees’ Responses to Group Incentives: The Moderating Role of Innovation

Purpose This study examined the mediating role of perceived organizational support (POS) in the relationship between group-incentive participation and organizational commitment. The study also investigated the moderating role of innovation in the relationship between group-incentive participation and POS and the relationship between group-incentive participation and organizational commitment.

Financial Incentives for Weight Loss and Healthy Behaviours

Rising rates of overweight and obesity are of serious concern in Canada. Until recently, discussion of policy options to promote healthier lifestyles has ignored the topic of direct financial incentives. The idea of paying people to lose weight or adopt healthier behaviours is now attracting study and debate. Some governments and companies are already experimenting with reward programs.Available evidence indicates that financial incentives help promote short-term change, but there is a dearth of evidence on longer-term programs and outcomes. Targeted incentives for specific risk groups have shown more success. With creative design, targeted use and evaluation, financial incentives for weight loss and healthy behaviour may be a useful addition to the health policy toolkit.

The Effects of Incentive System and Cognitive Orientation on Teams' Performance

ABSTRACT Organizations are adopting team-based structures to promote cooperation and coordination of actions and, thus, enhance performance (Libby and Thorne 2009; Chenhall 2008). However, team-based structures do not automatically improve performance. The economics literature suggests that working in teams may impair performance because of the potential conflict between individual and group incentives. In contrast, the organizational behavior literature argues that working in teams may enhance performance via members' collectivist cognitive orientation. This paper analyzes how both the economic incentive system and the team's predominant (individualist or collectivist) cognitive orientation affect team performance. We conduct an experiment with postgraduate students. Our results show that enhanced team performance is positively related to both individual economic incentives and predominately collectivist orientation in the team, and that the effectiveness of any incentive system design seems to be related to the team's predominant cognitive orientation.

A Study on Job Satisfaction Through Lifelong Education for Small & Medium Businesses Workers

Abstract This study involved a small business workers continuing education according to characteristics and job satisfaction by comparing the development of effective continuing education programs to improve workers' skills is to derive the key indicators. Job satisfaction than those below 40 in the 20s incentives, skills development, human resource management, organizational commitment was higher throughout the 20 to 30 units from 40 to 50 single professionals and young workers compared to their job satisfaction is higher, the number of years worked less than 5 years working in a different number of years than those in group incentives, skills development, human resource management overall significantly higher, rank in the lower position due to differences in job satisfaction was higher than the upper position, technical, administrative two trades was higher than Therefore, by improving job satisfaction in the workplace contributes to strengthening the competitiveness of enterprises and workers must strive to improve the quality of life.

Patient-care time allocation by nurse practitioners and physician assistants in the intensive care unit

IntroductionUse of nurse practitioners and physician assistants ("affiliates") is increasing significantly in the intensive care unit (ICU). Despite this, few data exist on how affiliates allocate their time in the ICU. The purpose of this study was to understand the allocation of affiliate time into patient-care and non-patient-care activity, further dividing the time devoted to patient care into billable service and equally important but nonbillable care.MethodsWe conducted a quasi experimental study in seven ICUs in an academic hospital and a hybrid academic/community hospital. After a period of self-reporting, a one-time monetary incentive of $2,500 was offered to 39 affiliates in each ICU in which every affiliate documented greater than 75% of their time devoted to patient care over a 6-month period in an effort to understand how affiliates allocated their time throughout a shift. Documentation included billable time (critical care, evaluation and management, procedures) and a new category ("zero charge time"), which facilitated record keeping of other patient-care activities.ResultsAt baseline, no ICUs had documentation of 75% patient-care time by all of its affiliates. In the 6 months in which reporting was tied to a group incentive, six of seven ICUs had every affiliate document greater than 75% of their time. Individual time documentation increased from 53% to 84%. Zero-charge time accounted for an average of 21% of each shift. The most common reason was rounding, which accounted for nearly half of all zero-charge time. Sign out, chart review, and teaching were the next most common zero-charge activities. Documentation of time spent on billable activities also increased from 53% of an affiliate's shift to 63%. Time documentation was similar regardless of during which shift an affiliate worked.ConclusionsApproximately two thirds of an affiliate's shift is spent providing billable services to patients. Greater than 20% of each shift is spent providing equally important but not reimbursable patient care. Understanding how affiliates spend their time and what proportion of time is spent in billable activities can be used to plan the financial impact of staffing ICUs with affiliates.

Growing overlap between terrorism and organized crime in India: A case study

This article discusses the growing overlap between organized crime and terrorism in India and highlights the key factors that explain this process. It begins with a summary of the Mumbai attacks of 2008 as an example of growing overlap between organized crime groups and terrorism in India. Organized crime groups that traditionally focused on money-making opportunities and stayed away from extreme forms of large-scale violence have increasingly been converging with terrorist outfits, especially in case of sectarian violence and religious terrorism. Some of the more obvious factors that facilitate this process are drugs and arms trafficking, while the less explored but equally dominant are socio-cultural, politico-religious and historical factors. The global war on terrorism has also increased networking opportunities and incentives for organized crime and terrorist groups that provide each other goods and services, while also adapting to each other’s business and methods.

Teams, Leaders, and Performance Measures*

This paper studies the effect of leadership on the ability to promote cooperation in teams through the performance measurement system. Performance measurement of teams can promote cooperation by rewarding team success, or can emphasize and reward individual success, by promoting competition via relative performance evaluation. In order to highlight the tradeoff between individual and group incentives, I consider the impact of leadership, where one agent with private productivity information acts as a leader and partially signals his information via his action to the agent who is an uninformed follower. With symmetric, privately informed agents, promoting cooperation with group incentives is more costly than promoting competition with individual incentives. The team is more likely to be successful than individuals and agents rewarded based on the team output earn more informational rents than agents rewarded for individual performance. With one informed agent, group incentives that promote cooperation can be preferred for both agents but only with signaling between the leader and follower. With no signaling, group incentives are too costly for the informed agent, but may be preferred for the uninformed agent. Uninformed agents earn fewer rents, but are productively inefficient; with signaling, the follower’s productive efficiency improves, lowering the cost. Also, because of the effect of the follower’s action on the leader’s incentives, the leader’s incentives are decreased, resulting in a lower payment. The results suggest that leadership can not only improve productive efficiencies via information sharing, but can reduce information rents, allowing for the use of cooperative performance measures.

Design, rationale, and baseline characteristics of a cluster randomized controlled trial of pay for performance for hypertension treatment: study protocol

BackgroundDespite compelling evidence of the benefits of treatment and well-accepted guidelines for treatment, hypertension is controlled in less than one-half of United States citizens.Methods/designThis randomized controlled trial tests whether explicit financial incentives promote the translation of guideline-recommended care for hypertension into clinical practice and improve blood pressure (BP) control in the primary care setting. Using constrained randomization, we assigned 12 Veterans Affairs hospital outpatient clinics to four study arms: physician-level incentive; group-level incentive; combination of physician and group incentives; and no incentives (control). All participants at the hospital (cluster) were assigned to the same study arm. We enrolled 83 full-time primary care physicians and 42 non-physician personnel. The intervention consisted of an educational session about guideline-recommended care for hypertension, five audit and feedback reports, and five disbursements of incentive payments. Incentive payments rewarded participants for chart-documented use of guideline-recommended antihypertensive medications, BP control, and appropriate responses to uncontrolled BP during a prior four-month performance period over the 20-month intervention. To identify potential unintended consequences of the incentives, the study team interviewed study participants, as well as non-participant primary care personnel and leadership at study sites. Chart reviews included data collection on quality measures not related to hypertension. To evaluate the persistence of the effect of the incentives, the study design includes a washout period.DiscussionWe briefly describe the rationale for the interventions being studied, as well as the major design choices. Rigorous research designs such as the one described here are necessary to determine whether performance-based payment arrangements such as financial incentives result in meaningful quality improvements.Trial Registrationhttp://www.clinicaltrials.govNCT00302718

Culture, Self-Orientation, and Reward Structure Effects: Measuring Cheating Behaviors in China and the USA

The research presented examines the roles of nationality, self-orientation, and reward conditions on students' willingness to cheat on a test linked to small financial rewards. Two country cultures are examined with China representing a collectivist culture and the United States representing an individualist culture.A self-construal measurement survey was administered in the first part of the study to examine dominant self-orientation (interdependent versus independent). Next, a between-subject experiment was conducted to measure cheating behavior both when rewards for performance are shared by the team and when rewards for performance are just for the individual. The results suggest that group incentives encourage more cheating behavior than individual incentives in both cultures. However, examining the role of individual self-orientation allowed us to observe differences in cheating behavior both within cultures and between cultures.

The Politics of Legitimacy: Humanitarianism vs. Materialist Interests in the Case of Child Labor Law in England

Although child labor has been nearly eradicated in rich countries, it remains pervasive in the developing world. Recent estimates indicate that 215 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 are working in some form of child labor. Of those children, 53% are engaged in work defined as hazardous, or “likely to harm [their] health, safety, and morals.” Given that children don’t vote or participate in politics, they have no political recourse to advocate for their own rights or interests. Aside from the obvious normative and welfare implications, child labor may have important consequences for economic development. Children who work sometimes do so at the expense of schooling. Given the proposed link between investment in human capital and economic growth and poverty alleviation, child work should be taken seriously as a potential bottleneck to development. To date, most academic work aimed at understanding child labor has been done by economists. Economists (unsurprisingly) attribute child labor patterns primarily to economic factors, and the link between child labor and poverty is fairly well-understood. However, comparatively little has been done to understand the politics of child labor. Activists and child welfare advocates frequently implicate the state, arguing that governments ought to do more to protect the interests of child workers. Without knowing more about the constraints and incentives of governments, however, it is difficult to understand the opportunities for and limitations of state action. Under what conditions do governments intervene on behalf of the rights of child workers? Child labor activists use ethical arguments about child welfare to advocate for state protection of child workers, but skeptics argue that these humanitarian ideas have little power in the face of economic interests in keeping cheap child labor available.The 1833 Factory Act is credited as the world’s first piece of child labor legislation with any enforcement clout. It was passed at the height of the Industrial Revolution, when child labor was cheap, readily available, and still being used widely in the textile industry, which was a major engine of growth in British economic development. Despite the fact that the legislation was bitterly opposed by the powerful industrial class, and despite the fact that members of the government had an economic interest in keeping their economy productive for the purpose of taxation and geopolitical competition, they nevertheless passed legislation that effectively imposed a tax on one of the industry’s key inputs, child labor. A simple model based on economic interests would not predict this outcome. What explains the introduction of laws against child labor at precisely a time when it made little economic sense to do so?This paper considers the following question: since the economic interests of powerful societal groups fail to account for the outcome of child labor law during the British Industrial Revolution, what explains it? Ultimately I consider the relative contribution of economic interests, political incentives, and ideational factors in the adoption of the 1833 Factory Act.The puzzle of child labor law has relevance for a larger theoretical question, of interest to those who study institutions as well as those with development or humanitarian goals: Under what conditions do humanitarian considerations (such as minority protection, human rights, or labor rights) get institutionalized into rules when they run contrary to materialist incentives of powerful societal groups? What is the power of ideas about rights in the face of materialist interests? Is discourse about humanitarianism merely rhetorical window-dressing for the unfolding of political and economic interests, or do ideational factors have real influence in protecting the rights of marginalized groups?This paper is a hypothesis-generating case study. It includes a detailed case history of the birth of child labor law in England. This paper does not make a systematic attempt to quantify its conclusions – I leave that to future work. The aim here is to present qualitative evidence from the first case of child labor law and situate it in political and historical context in order to elucidate why and how political elites legally restricted child labor during a period when the employment of children was contributing significantly to the productivity of a key British industry and was economically profitable to an increasingly powerful class of industrialists.

Cognitive and affective approaches to employee participation: Integration of the two approaches

Numerous studies have examined cognitive and affective approaches to decision-making participation, but no study has attempted to integrate the two approaches. This is the first empirical study to apply the two approaches to financial participation. To integrate the two approaches, this study investigated the applicability of the two approaches to decision-making and financial participation as well as the relationship between two essential variables in each approach: information sharing and organizational commitment. The proposed hypotheses were tested by structural equation models using the Workplace Employment Relations Survey, which was conducted in Great Britain. The findings revealed that self-managing teams and group incentives were positively related to information sharing, which in turn were positively associated with organizational commitment and perceived company performance. Cross-cultural implications are discussed.

When Civil Wars Recur: Conditions for Durable Peace after Civil Wars

We argue that the duration of the peace after civil wars is mainly a function of the extent to which the outcome of the previous civil war preserved a condition of multiple sovereignty and the extent to which the post-civil war environment creates incentives for dissident groups to resort to violence rather than sustain the peace. Hazard models suggest that the outcome of the previous conflict does affect the duration of the peace, and this effect varies across time. The introduction of peacekeeping forces has a substantial positive effect on peace duration. We also find evidence of a curvilinear relationship between ethnic fractionalization and post-civil war peace duration. Based on these results, we conclude with recommendations for how peace can be maintained after a civil war.

The Emergence of Organized Criminal Networks as Extralegal Authorities

Globalization and the contemporary global order have facilitated the emergence of new aspects of governance within, between, and across the state scale. The re-articulation and re-scaling of the state involves the devolution of specifi c aspects of governance capacities to supraand sub-state scales, constituting a vast transglobal arena where a bewildering array of private, non-state actors, networks and polities take on roles previously performed by the state. This reconfi guration of the position of the nation-state transcends the Westphalian “territorial trap,” when it comes to produce new sites of power, new forms of authority and regulation through a reshuffl ing of traditional sociopolitical relationships. The distinguishing feature of these alternative authority structures is that they tend not to be embodied at what has been historically constituted as the national or local scale, but rather are represented along the multiple, overlapping scales that make up global relations. Within those hybrid scales a broad spectrum of actors interact and struggle for power and control: from public and private alternatives to sovereign states, from institutions of global governance to the transnational third sector, from religious movements to complex criminal organizations. Among the most signifi cant developments that has taken within this arena and has been fostered by the attendant sociopolitical and economic changes is the emergence and empowering of criminal organizations, whose cross-border networks and ability to continue their activities depends on their capacity to delegitimize governmental efforts to control their behavior. Complicating matters further, the strengthening of regulatory regimes usually creates perverse incentives for organized crime groups to expand their activities and increase their profi ts. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it became increasingly clear that the rise of transnational organized crime was inextricably connected with contemporary changes in the scope and competence of states’ authority over their societies and territory,

Sharing the Future: Financial Innovation and Innovators in Solving the Political Economy Challenges of Development

The failure to align the incentives of self-interested groups in favor of beneficial reform is often considered a major cause of persistent underdevelopment around the world. However, much less is known about strategies that have been successful at overcoming such political economy challenges. One approach that holds much promise, and in fact appears to have had some historical success, is the provision of financial assets that align the interests of winners and potential losers from reform by providing claims on the future. This paper analyzes the role of financial instruments as a means for fostering broad political coalitions that favor beneficial reforms. It takes as a departure point the benchmark theory of portfolio choice, in which all agents hold the same (market) portfolio and thus all beneficial reforms are adopted. It then analyzes a range of historical cases in which innovative financial assets, often introduced by technocratic reformers, have succeeded at making politics less conflictual overtime, focusing on three revolutionary states that subsequently led the world in economic growth: England, the early United States and Meiji Japan. The paper draws upon the theory and the historical cases to assess the promise of finance in solving political economy challenges in contemporary settings.

Use of incentives and web-based administration for surveying student alcohol and substance use in an ethnically diverse sample

With increasing burden on schools and requirements for active parental consent, low student survey participation rates are problematic, including where ethnic minority students are often underrepresented in behavioural risk surveys. To improve parent permission rates and survey participation, incentive use (individual vs. group) and mode of survey administration (web-based vs. paper–pencil) were examined in a sample of ethnically diverse students (n = 2488) in the 6th, 8th, 10th and 12th grades from eight schools in Hawai‘i. Mode of survey administration was also compared for student reporting of alcohol and other substance use and associated risk and protective factors. Classes were assigned to one of four conditions based on incentive type and route of survey administration. The group incentive was associated with a significantly higher rate of parental permission compared to individual incentive; however, it did not impact survey completion rate. Students who took the web-based version compared to the paper–pencil version of the survey were more likely to report use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs in the past 12 months. The use of web-based surveys may increase reporting of sensitive behaviours such as substance use among adolescents compared to paper–pencil versions.

Conflict Prevention and Decentralized Governance: Some Remarks About the State of the Art in Theory and Practice

Is there a link between decentralized governance and conflict prevention? This article tries to answer the question by presenting the state of the art of the intersection of both concepts. Provided that social conflict is inevitable and given the appearance of new threats and types of violence, as well as new demands for security based on people (human security), our societies should focus on promoting peaceful changes.Through an extensive analysis of the existing literature and the study of several cases, this paper suggests that decentralized governance can contribute to these efforts by transforming conflicts, bringing about power-sharing and inclusion incentives of minority groups. Albeit the complexity of assessing its impact on conflict prevention, it can be contended that decentralized governance might have very positive effects on the reduction of causes that bring about conflicts due to its ability to foster the creation of war/violence preventors. More specifically, this paper argues that decentralization can have a positive impact on the so-called triggers and accelerators (short and medium-term causes).

The impact of group incentives on performance of small firms: Hausman-Taylor estimates

This paper investigates the impact of group incentives on firms' performance. It shows that group incentive raises firms' performance. This result empirically validates the implication of the theoretical literature that performance-related pay can potentially improve firms' performance, in the context of a developing country, and indicates the importance of group incentives in small firms. It also shows that partnership firms perform better than private limited companies and labour unions have a negative impact on firms' performance. It employs the Hausman–Taylor random effects estimator in order to isolate the effects of time-invariant covariates and also to tackle potential endogeneity problem. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Management Insights

Management Insights

Employee involvement and group incentives in manufacturing companies: a multi‐level analysis

The effects of employee involvement and group incentives on organisational commitment and turnover intention were examined using data from a survey of over 4,000 employees in 29 manufacturing companies. Using the mediated moderation model, we investigated the moderating role of capital intensity on the relationships between employee involvement and group incentives and these outcomes, and the mediating role of organisational commitment on the effects of employee involvement and group incentives on turnover intention. The findings revealed that employee involvement is more effective in capital‐intensive companies than in labour‐intensive companies, but group incentives are more effective in labour‐intensive companies. The moderated effects on turnover intention were mediated through organisational commitment. Implications for company policies and future research are discussed.

Beyond methodological nationalism: how multilevel governance affects the clash of capitalisms

This article challenges the methodological nationalism of the convergence debate by arguing that multilevel governance destabilizes the coalitions thought to underpin liberal and co-ordinated varieties of capitalism. Many attempts to explain how coherent production regimes emerge and persist assume that some dominant social bloc ensures coherence by imposing its interests across all relevant regulatory subspheres. This assumption is not tenable in systems of multilevel governance. Three features of multilevel governance diminish the scope for a homogenous social bloc to ensure a tight coupling of complementary regulations. First, the incentives for interest groups to unite at the transnational level vary across regulatory subspheres, because the transnational scope of legislation adds a ‘constrain-thy-neighbour’ dimension to actors' decision-making that may either strengthen or weaken interest group cohesion. Second, the strategic opportunities for playing multilevel games vary across subspheres. Third, the institutional set-up at the supranational level of Europe's multilevel polity reduces the capacity of state actors to impose coherence from above. To illustrate these claims, the article draws on case studies of EU legislative initiatives concerning takeovers and worker participation.