Research on Incentives in the Workplace A Case Study of Sales Managers’ Incentive of An Internet-Finance Company

Lu, mingjie (2017) Research on Incentives in the Workplace A Case Study of Sales Managers’ Incentive of An Internet-Finance Company. [Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)]

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Abstract

Our primary objective in this paper is to analyse the utility of incentive mechanism in the workplace. The analysis builds on the framework that a company's incentive policy is a principal-agent game’s prevalent embodiment within organisations.

We start the analysis from the overview of the literature. Through classifying previous research on this topic by two dimensions, monetary and non-monetary, we introduce piece-rate, tournament, commission these conventional approaches of financial incentive and awards, job enrichment as the usual methods of non-monetary incentive. Every method's advantages, disadvantages, influential factors and feasibility are explicitly described in the review. The literature review deepens our understanding of various forms of incentives, more importantly, providing us with the theoretical support of following real case analysis. In the aim of finding incentive system's utility, this paper does not use experimental investigation. It compares the theoretical notions and the practical effect through a real case analysis. We first explain the process and the logic of devising this incentive policy and then analyse the result after implementation. All the participants are grouped into five teams according to their former performance before applying the new policy. We analyse these the overall performance trend and five teams’ change of their tournament rank order. These two aspects’ trend indicates the development of overall and individual level of effort respectively. We found that incentive have some favourable impact on working behaviours, but it must use under the appropriate situation.

The result of applying these incentive tactics provides some pieces of evidence to other research. But due to the uniqueness of this particular case, it also displays a few different perspectives of some papers' academic studies. Overall, the main contribution of this article is broadening our body of knowledge regarding the incentives, and recommendations relating to the prospect of this case and suggestions of how to improve the motivation tactics might give us enlightenment of incentive design in the workplace.

Item Type: Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Keywords: incentive, sales force behaviour, non-monetary, monetary, commission, tournament,motivation
Depositing User: Lu, Mingjie
Date Deposited: 18 Apr 2018 08:46
Last Modified: 24 Apr 2018 14:40
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/45956

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