If you accidentally stumbled into a solution for a major problem at work, would you turn down an employee-of-the month award? What if you spent hours of work on something trivial, and your boss offered a free lunch as a reward?
Yale SOM marketing professor Corey Cusimano wondered if there are patterns to when people feel they have earned a reward. Does hard work alone justify being compensated, or does success matter more? Would a waiter who struggles in vain to satisfy difficult customers feel as entitled to a hefty tip as one who effortlessly pleases happy diners?
Cusimano and two Yale PhD students, Jin Kim—now a postdoctoral research associate at Northeastern University—and Jared Wong, set out to understand the factors that might make people feel like they deserve the reward. To do this, they gave people work to do, and after, offered them monetary rewards that they could accept or decline.
Their initial guess was that effort was the most important consideration. “We thought if you made people work really hard, they would take money,” he says. “And if you had them perform a really easy task, then you offered money, they’d say, ‘Oh, I didn’t work very hard, I probably shouldn’t take this.’”
They set out to test their theory with a pilot study using the online labor platform Prolific. Through Prolific’s market, workers take jobs that last just a few minutes and pay about $0.14 to $0.26 per minute. The workers can also get extra pay in the form of bonuses. The initial results were unexpected: workers who put in significant effort were no more likely to feel entitled to rewards than workers who completed an easy task of little effort.
“Everything else that follows in our work is us trying to come to terms with this thing that really surprised us,” says Cusimano. “We thought maybe we’d made a mistake.”
Driving their disbelief was that much of the literature around feelings of entitlement to rewards emphasizes the role of hard work over positive outcomes. So the researchers designed a more extensive study to tease apart the impact of effort and achievement when it comes to people receiving and accepting rewards.
In their new paper, Cusimano, Kim, and Wong find that it’s achievement, or doing well, that strongly predicts how much people end up paying themselves. Working hard, by contrast, played little to no detectable role in how much money study participants believed they deserved.
“It’s very striking,” Cusimano says, “because participants were anonymous, and it would have been easy for everyone to take the money without any consequences. But people who thought they did a bad job at the task took pause in taking the money, independent of whether or not they thought the task was easy or hard.”
