ABSTRACT A recent trend in organizations is to motivate employees with goal‐based prosocial rewards, whereby employees must donate their rewards to charities upon goal attainment. We examine the motivational effects of goal‐based prosocial rewards versus cash rewards under different levels of goal difficulty. We develop our hypotheses based on affective valuation theory, which posits that when valuing uncertain outcomes by affect rather than calculation, individuals are largely insensitive to changes in probability of the outcomes, including probability of goal attainment. Experiment results support our hypotheses. Specifically, we find that employees who are rewarded with prosocial (vs. cash) goal‐based rewards are more likely to adopt an affective valuation approach. Consequently, when employees are assigned either an easy goal or a stretch goal, their effort is higher when incentivized with a goal‐based prosocial reward than a cash reward. Furthermore, there is a less curve‐linear relationship between goal difficulty and effort with prosocial (vs. cash) goal‐based rewards. These findings highlight for incentive system designers the motivational advantage of goal‐based prosocial rewards relative to traditional cash rewards. Furthermore, we extend the academic literature by showing how affect‐rich rewards such as prosocial rewards can influence employees' assessment of the probability of goal attainment.

Vertical pay dispersion is the difference in pay across different hierarchical levels within an organization (Milkovich and Newman ). While vertical pay dispersion may be useful in attracting, retaining, and motivating highly skilled employees (Lazear and Rosen ; Lazear ; Prendergast ), our study investigates a potential disadvantage; specifically, the negative impact of perceived unfairness of vertical pay dispersion on employees' budgeting decisions. We predict and find that high vertical pay dispersion motivates subordinates to misreport costs to a greater extent than low vertical pay dispersion. Furthermore, we predict and find that superiors, on average, exercise more lenient cost controls when vertical pay dispersion is high rather than low. Supplemental analysis indicates superiors are more lenient on average because of their aversion to inequity caused by vertical pay dispersion. Our results suggest that high vertical pay dispersion can compromise the overall corporate budgeting environment, where higher levels of misreporting by subordinates goes unchecked by superiors.

ABSTRACT In this study, we examine the joint effect of vertical pay dispersion and peer observability on subordinates' misreporting choices. We adopt a participative budgeting setting in which two subordinates report to one superior, and we manipulate vertical pay dispersion (low/high) and peer observability (absent/present). Subordinates have private information about actual project costs and can over‐report project costs to the superior without detection and thus create budgetary slack. When a peer's reporting choices are observable, we predict and find that peer reporting choices have an asymmetric influence on the focal subordinates' reporting choices, and this asymmetric influence depends on the level of vertical pay dispersion. Specifically, we find that when vertical pay dispersion is low, subordinates who observe peer reports containing low slack misreport less , whereas observing peer reports that contain high slack has no significant effect. However, when vertical pay dispersion is high , subordinates who observe peer reports containing high slack misreport more , whereas observing peer reports that contain low slack has no significant effect. Driven by these asymmetric effects, subordinates misreport less in the presence of peer observability than in its absence when vertical pay dispersion is low and misreport more in the presence of peer observability than in its absence when vertical pay dispersion is high. Overall, our findings suggest that when a firm has a more egalitarian pay structure (i.e., low vertical pay dispersion), an open information policy is conducive to a more honest reporting environment, whereas under a more hierarchical pay structure (i.e., high vertical pay dispersion), open information policies can compromise the honesty of subordinates' reports.