Seminari Celliane Ferraz Pazetto

Celliane Ferraz Pazetto (CUNEF) will present her paper “Designing Reward Systems for Teams: Enhancing Commitment and Task Performance While Accounting for Psychosocial Motives,” alongside Ilse Maria Beuren (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina) and Jacobo Goméz-Conde (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid).

Abstract:

This study examines how reward system design influences commitment to team goals and task performance, considering the moderating role of goal difficulty and the mediation of participant’s need to belong to the team. In a scenario-based experiment, 138 students in three-member teams engaged in a joint decision-making task with rewards based on either (i) individual or (ii) group performance. Results suggest that individual-based incentives led to higher goal commitment, albeit with marginal significance, a decision based on rational economics. In contrast, group-based incentives—despite potential free riding—resulted in higher task performance, predicted based on the tasks and goals designed more interdependently, which likely promoted social cohesion and peer- level monitoring within teams compensated based on the overall performance. Goal difficulty did not intensify these relationships, diverging from goal-setting theory, but most likely seeing in effort-tasks. While the need to belong did not mediate these effects, it predicted higher commitment. Participants perceived group-based incentives as fairer than individual incentives, challenging equity theory assumption of strictly rational input- output evaluations. These findings underscore the complexity of designing reward systems that balance extrinsic and intrinsic motives, controlling teams for high collective performance while influencing team-members being effectively motivated, whereas monitoring for dysfunctional team dynamics. Group-based incentives resulted in significantly improved task performance when participants were rewarded collectively working toward a shared gain, in a creative, complex and interdependent task. So, in those conditions this incentive should be prioritized.