Results (
Vietnamese) 1:
[Copy]Copied!
We have already noted that one potential explanation for these discrepancies is social desirability—the idea that to be motivated by money is somehow “crass” or undignified. Another explanation, however, may lie in the kinds of information that HR professionals receive about pay in the most widely read practitioner journals. A review of these jour- nals shows that articles about motivation are based on the types of survey evidence pre- sented in the first column of Table I, rather than the behavioral evidence reported in col- umn two. As such, it is perhaps not surpris- ing that practitioner journals tend to widely disseminate the idea that pay is not a very important motivator.Consider, for example, the February2004 issue of HR Magazine, the periodical that Rynes et al. (2002) found to be far and away the most frequently read source of in- formation by HR professionals. The cover story, called “Getting Engaged” (Bates,2004), reports on two recent surveys of em- ployee “engagement,” defined as the “bases for . . . an innate human desire to contribute something of value to the workplace.” Roughly, then, engagement would appear to have much in common with the psychologi- cal construct of motivation.The first survey, by Towers Perrin (2003), identified ten factors influencing engage- ment. In contradiction of the meta-analytic evidence presented earlier, pay was not even on the list. (The top four were senior man- agers’ interest in employees’ well-being, chal- lenging work, decision-making authority, and customer focus.) A Towers Perrin principal was quoted as saying, “A lot of the drivers of engagement are subtle issues that don’t re- quire a lot of capital outlay. They take work” (Bates, 2004, p. 64).2 Similarly, the second survey (by Walker Information) reported the top five factors with the “greatest influence on an employee’s commitment to a firm” (note that commitment is not the same as motivation). Again, pay was not on the list.A similar tendency to publish viewpoints arguing against the importance of pay exists in other practitioner resources as well. Con- sider, for example, the Harvard Business Re- view, which has a circulation of a quarter- million and tends to be read by high-level executives who are in charge of corporate strategy. A review over the past 12 years re- veals the following titles: “Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work” (Kohn, 1993, who goes on to explain “why bribes simply cannot work”), “Six Dangerous Myths about Pay” (Pfeffer, 1998, which claims it is a “myth” that individual pay-for-performance is an ef- fective motivator), and “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” (Herzberg, 1987, whose answer basically is “not with pay, because pay is actually a de- motivator”). Moreover, in introducing a re- cent special issue of HBR on “The Most Tan- gible Assets” (i.e., employees), the “From the Editors” section identified two overarching themes of the articles, one of which was that “we learn that while traditional rewards and punishments can, if ill managed, severely damage motivation, they have little benefi- cial effect under even the best of circum- stances.” These claims are simply inconsis- tent with the voluminous evidence, based on hundreds of studies, exemplified in the sec- ond column of Table I. (For a more extensive treatment of these and other research distor- tions, see Gerhart & Rynes, 2003.)In summary, research on employee re- sponses to HR interventions shows rather convincingly that pay is a very important mo- tivator. The most general theoretical explana- tion for pay’s importance is the fact that it is useful for obtaining so many other desirable things (Lawler, 1971). For example, in addi- tion to Maslow’s (1943) frequently men- tioned “lower-order” needs (such as food and shelter), money can also pave the way toward social status, a good education for one’s chil- dren, or making it possible to retire early and enjoy increased leisure.
Being translated, please wait..
