Join the Department of Management for their Brown Bag Seminar featuring Kun Ho from the Ivey School of Business at Western University.

About the presentation:

Firms often use incentives to motivate employees to exert greater effort and achieve higher performance. Prior research, however, shows that incentives can be both beneficial and detrimental to performance of complex problems that require insight. I argue that the effect of incentives on insight problem solving is conditional on employee skill, which can be gained through training. At lower levels of skill (without problem-solving training), incentives can reduce individuals’ performance by increasing fixation on conventional problem-solve approaches. At higher levels of skill (with problem-solving training), incentives can increase performance by facilitating the learning and application of techniques esigned to reduce fixation on convention. I also argue the effect of incentives depends on the type of incentive scheme. Holding the expected average compensation constant, a piece-rate scheme is more likely to be detrimental to performance than a fixed wage plus recognition scheme, which praises top-performer  but does not embarrass bottom-performers.

Bring your lunch – we’ll bring the beverages!

We look forward to seeing you there!