Notes &
What would you expect the results to be? When we posed this question to a group of business students, they said they expected performance to improve with the amount of the reward. But this was not what we found. The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.
Op-Ed Contributor - What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? - NYTimes.com
This is an interesting study, but it seems difficult to compare the performance in a discreet, time-limited task with performance in a long term job. It seems like the stress / nervousness / anxiety issues wouldn’t have time to be worked out during the experimental sessions, but would giveway over the long term in job performance.
