The demands of a changing workforce are creating increasing demand for incentive professionals to boost...
Non-Cash Rewards in a Period of High Inflation: Scope Sensitivity and General Evaluability Theory Firms should review and optimize their incentives and rewards programs to address the unique workforce challenges they face in 2022. Inflation in the United States has reached an annual rate of 8.5%, heights not seen since the early 1980s.[i] Though wages…
Of the few dozen business books critiqued in Academic Research in Action thus far in 2022, The Voltage Effect by University of Chicago economist John A. List counts among the most insightful. List comes from the hard-nosed “Chicago School,” that includes Milton Friedman. Friedman’s free market theories underpinned economic policy under Ronald Reagan and Margaret…
March 2022 The Covid-19 pandemic initially drove mass layoffs, vaulting the US unemployment rate to almost 15% at its peak in April 2020, the highest in more than 70 years.[1] In Covid’s continuing wake, however, the jobless rate has dropped precipitously, to just over 2% for degreed workers and 4% overall.[2] This and unprecedented churn…
February 2022 After two years of pandemic-driven disruption, many of us have become amateur students of epidemiology. The manner in which contagions diffuse – or do not – should concern leaders across every industry, but not just to combat Covid-19. The spread of social contagions will play a critical role in late-stage and post-pandemic recovery.…
January 2022 In 1999, behavioral economist Richard Thaler published his groundbreaking mental accounting theory. In it, Thaler describes how people tend to code and organize their money and expenses, in effect, putting different value on the same amounts of money depending on how they classify it (e.g, ‘fun’ money versus money to pay the bills).…
Throughout their 2020 book, Lessons from the Titans, Wall Street veterans Scott Davis, Rob Wertheimer, and Carter Copeland cite incentives as one of three prime managerial levers that signal what’s important, shape employee actions and behaviors, and build the culture: “Where the top of the organization influences culture is on actions and incentive” How much…
Through much of 2021, the IRF and researchers from the University of Waterloo and the University of Central Florida collected data and conducted interviews in an exploration of the psychology behind employee points-based reward programs. These programs have proliferated inside organizations almost in tandem with their popularity in the consumer space. We analyzed survey results…
October 2021 Behavioral science is less a discrete arena of study, and more an interdisciplinary approach to gaining a better understanding of why people do what they do – and, by extension, how to influence their thoughts, actions, and choices. Sound familiar? While the science remains ill-defined – and, for most, a little mysterious –…
the important role incentive program designers have in helping firms reward and recognize workers in ways that lead to better-functioning teams.
August 2021 Applied Social Exchange Theory in Social Recognition Program Design Social Exchange Theory (SET) evolved in the 1950s from early 20th century behaviorism and reinforcement theory – the notion that people act in response to positive stimuli or to avoid negative stimuli. SET extends positive and negative stimuli to include social recognition (good and…
