Prior theory suggests that incentive plans, such as piece-rate or commission plans, motivate good performance because employees anticipate that current performance will generate matching future incentive payments. In this article, we move beyond reward expectancy to argue that performance can also derive from employees’ reactive responses to received incentive payments. We propose a salience-based theory casting incentive payments as recurring temporal markers that periodically increase the salience of the incentive plan, to which employees respond by temporarily increasing incentivized and unincentivized performance. We introduce multivariate time-series methods to test our hypotheses in longitudinal data spanning 169 weeks (1,183 days), drawn from an online firm using an incentive plan for its customer-support employees. While we find no evidence that incentive payments affect the dynamics of incentivized performance, they do temporarily boost several unincentivized behaviors and outcomes. Combined with fieldwork, these findings support our proposed mechanism of “salience-induced reciprocity”—that is, the temporary reciprocity in response to a periodic increase in the salience of the incentive plan. This article contributes to a more complete understanding of performance and effort dynamics in incentive plans, offers new inroads into studying temporality in the functioning of human resources practices, and provides other future research avenues.

先前的理论表明，奖励计划，例如计件工资或佣金计划，会激励良好的绩效，因为员工预计当前的绩效将产生匹配的未来奖励金。在本文中，我们超越奖励预期，认为绩效也可以源自员工对收到的奖励付款的反应。我们提出了一种基于显着性的理论，将激励付款作为周期性时间标记，周期性地增加激励计划的显着性，员工通过暂时增加受激励和不受激励的绩效来回应。我们引入了多变量时间序列方法来测试我们在 169 周（1,183 天）的纵向数据中的假设，这些数据来自一家在线公司，对其客户支持员工使用激励计划。虽然我们没有发现任何证据表明激励支付会影响激励绩效的动态，但它们确实会暂时促进一些非激励行为和结果。结合实地调查，这些发现支持我们提出的“显着性诱导互惠”机制——即临时互惠以响应激励计划显着性的周期性增加。本文有助于更全面地了解激励计划中的绩效和努力动态，为研究人力资源实践运作的时间性提供了新的途径，并提供了其他未来的研究途径。这些发现支持了我们提出的“显着性诱导互惠”机制——即对激励计划显着性周期性增加做出的临时互惠。本文有助于更全面地了解激励计划中的绩效和努力动态，为研究人力资源实践运作的时间性提供了新的途径，并提供了其他未来的研究途径。这些发现支持了我们提出的“显着性诱导互惠”机制——即对激励计划显着性周期性增加做出的临时互惠。本文有助于更全面地了解激励计划中的绩效和努力动态，为研究人力资源实践运作的时间性提供了新的途径，并提供了其他未来的研究途径。