Our life is built around coordinating efforts with others. This usually involves incentivizing others to do things and sustaining our relationship with them. Using the wrong incentives backfires: it lowers effort and tarnishes our relationships. But what constitutes a “wrong” incentive? And can incentives be used to shape relationships in a desired manner? To address these and other questions, we introduce relational incentives theory, which distinguishes between two aspects of incentives: schemes (how the incentive is used) and means (what is used as an incentive). Prior research has focused on means (e.g., monetary vs. nonmonetary incentives). Our theory highlights the importance of schemes, with a focus on how they interact with social relationships. It posits that the efficacy of incentives depends largely on whether the scheme fits the relational structure of the persons involved in the activity: participation incentive schemes for communal sharing relations, hierarchy for authority ranking relations, balancing for equality matching relations, and proportional incentive schemes for market pricing relations. We show that these four schemes encompass some of the most prevalent variants of incentives. We then discuss the antecedents and consequences of the use of congruent and incongruent incentive schemes. We argue that congruent incentives can reinforce the relationship. Incongruent incentives disrupt relational motives, which undermines the coordinating relationship and reduces effort. But, importantly, incongruent incentives can also be used intentionally to shift to a new relational model. The theory thus contributes to research on relational models by showing how people constitute and modulate relationships. It adds to the incentives and contracting literatures by offering a framework for analyzing the structural congruence between incentives and relationships, yielding predictions about the effects of incentives across different organizational and individual-level contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

中文翻译：

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关系激励理论。

我们的生活建立在与他人协调努力的基础上。这通常涉及激励他人做事并维持我们与他们的关系。使用错误的激励措施会适得其反：它会降低努力并损害我们的关系。但什么构成“错误”的激励？是否可以使用激励措施以理想的方式塑造关系？为了解决这些问题和其他问题，我们引入了关系激励理论，该理论区分了激励的两个方面：计划（如何使用激励）和手段（使用什么作为激励）。先前的研究集中在手段上（例如，货币与非货币激励）。我们的理论强调了方案的重要性，重点是它们如何与社会关系互动。它假设激励的有效性在很大程度上取决于该计划是否适合参与活动的人的关系结构：公共共享关系的参与激励计划，权威等级关系的等级激励计划，平等匹配关系的平衡和比例激励计划市场定价关系。我们表明，这四个计划包含一些最流行的激励变体。然后，我们讨论使用一致和不一致激励计划的前因和后果。我们认为，一致的激励可以加强这种关系。不一致的激励会破坏关系动机，从而破坏协调关系并减少努力。但是，重要的是，不一致的激励也可以被有意地用于转向新的关系模型。因此，该理论通过展示人们如何构成和调节关系而有助于对关系模型的研究。它通过提供一个分析激励和关系之间结构一致性的框架来增加激励和合同文献，从而预测激励在不同组织和个人层面背景下的影响。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）