Gesiarz et al (2020) carried out three randomised control experiments to investigate the impact of reward inequality on human motivation. More specifically, they investigated the impact of the opportunity gap on motivation, with opportunity gaps representing the different sets of rewards available to a person for an equivalent amount of effort. Their findings supported the hypothesis that high inequality and the sense of unfairness leads to less motivation across the entire rewarded population.
Paper hypothesis
The paper investigates the impact of reward inequality on people’s motivation for the reward. The study has two central hypotheses:
People with a higher relative reward would be more motivated than those with a lower relative reward. The hypothesis reflects people’s tendency to value their own rewards relative to the rewards of others. As a result, people with a relatively lower reward value it less, not merely due to its absolute size, but also due to the comparison effect. The opposite occurs with people who receive a relatively higher reward.
. The wider the opportunity gap the less people get motivated by the reward, regardless of its relative size, due to a sense of unfairness.
Methodology
The two central hypotheses are investigated via one main and two robustness check experiments. In the main experiment, participants were informed that the task would consist of a mandatory book transcribing task, for which they will be paid £0.25, and an optional transcribing task for which they would receive a bonus payment. They were also informed that the wage for the optional task would be randomly drawn. Once their randomly drawn bonus wage was revealed to them, they were also presented with the payments offered to other participants. By manipulating the participants’ perception of their bonus size and the fairness of the whole reward distribution, researchers estimate the impact of the opportunity gap on work motivation: would participants accept or reject the optional task?
Result
The results verified both hypotheses: firstly, participants valued the reward more if they were higher on the reward distribution. Secondly, more unequal wage distribution led to a lower willingness to work across all groups. In fact, participants reported a sense of unhappiness when put under the unfairness condition, which demotivated them from accepting the task.
Conclusion
The paper concludes that people get demotivated to pursue a reward when 1) there is a big variance of rewards and 2) people do not feel they deserve their relative place in the reward distribution. At first glance, it seems that in our highly unequal global society rewards are also distributed randomly and thus can be viewed as unfair. For example, person’s nationality itself, which one may assume is given at random , can explain 66% of global variation in living standards[1]. However, the real world is much more complex than the study setting: people do not necessarily compare themselves to the entire human population, nor do they perceive their partially randomly generated rewards as unfair. As a result, the Gesiarz et al (2020) paper opens an interesting discussion on the impact of inequality on motivation , but further research is needed to understand the paper’s relevance.
[1] Milanovic B. Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live? The Review of Economics and Statistics. 2014; 97: 452–460. https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_ 00432
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