It's Pressure,also Motivation:A Study of the Nonlinear Effect of Pay for Performance on Employees'Work Proactivity
In the increasingly"involutional"competitive market environment,more and more enterprises adopt pay for per-formance as an important tool to motivate employees'work proactivity.Although there is substantial evidence indicating that pay for performance has a significant incentive effect on employees,the unstable effect of pay for performance in organization-al practice has become a realistic problem for managers.Therefore,it is particularly important to examine the nonlinear incent-ive effect of pay for performance and the cognitive appraisal process of employees under different intensity conditions of pay for performance.Based on the cognitive appraisal of stress theory,the dynamic psychometric process of employees'evaluation of earnings and inputs could be incorporated into the framework of stress perception of pay for performance to reveal the nonlinear effects of pay for performance on employees'work proactivity and its underlying mechanisms.Specifically,we first test the nonlinear effects of pay for performance on employees'perception of challenging stress,then examine the nonlinear mediating effects of pay for performance on employees'work proactivity through employees'perception of challenging stress,and finally inspect the nonlinear moderating effects and nonlinear moderated mediating effects of employees'pay valence in the above relation-ship.Three time-point paired data of 258 bank employees were obtained through questionnaire collection.The instantaneous simple slope test,instantaneous indirect effect test,and instantaneous moderated mediated effect test were conducted by hier-archical regression analysis,path analysis,and Monte Carlo test with the help of Spss 26.0,Mplus 8.3,and R 4.1.3.The results of the study show that there is a U-shaped relationship between pay for performance and employees'per-ceived challenge stress,and pay for performance transmits a U-shaped indirect effect on employees'work proactivity through employees'challenge stress perception.Employee pay valence significantly moderates the above nonlinear indirect effect,i.e.,this indirect curvilinear effect is stronger when employee pay valence is high compared to employees with low pay valence.The findings demonstrate the U-shaped role of the incentive effect of pay for performance,which contrasts with the main-stream that pay for performance exerts an inverted U-shaped incentive effect,and provides new ideas for the research on the ef-fectiveness of pay for performance.Meanwhile,it further expands and refines the differential effects of different pay for per-formance intensities on employees'cognitive appraisal process and their work proactivity.These conclusions have important implications for managers in the design of compensation programs and the development of interventions.
pay for performancework proactivitychallenge stress perceptionpay valencenonlinear effect
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