Extreme numbers influence initial salary offers

Despite some schools of thought, it's generally to your advantage to name a price first in negotiations. This is thanks to the anchoring effect, where presenting a value skews later judgments towards it.  There is plenty of evidence that setting salary for a new role is influenced by relevant anchors, such as the applicant stating their previous pay or expectations for this job. But decision-making research suggests that estimates and attributions can be influenced by even arbitrary and extreme anchors. Todd Thorsteinson at the University of Idaho set about seeing how crazy numbers might also shape take-home pay.

206 psychology students were asked to make a salary suggestion for a desirable job applicant question. Participants were presented with the applicant's description including two anchors: a realistic one of the applicant's previous salary ($29,000), and an unusual one of either $100k or $1, embedded within a joking statement they made about their salary expectations. The joking context was considered necessary to allow the unusual anchor to be presented without triggering other effects, like being considered overly arrogant or having poor judgment. Participants given the high unusual anchor awarded a higher salary than both those given the low unusual anchor and a control condition with just the realistic anchor.

A second experiment asked its 150 participants to additionally record their perceptions when reading about the applicant, and introduced an even more extreme anchor: one million dollars. Participants were not put off by the extreme anchor, perceiving it as just as plausible and influential as  the $100k reference, and in both cases ended up offering the applicant a higher salary than when these high anchors were absent. So, just as in the literature on estimation, even radically inappropriate anchors can sway decisions. It's worth noting too that the unusual anchors had their effect despite being presented alongside realistic ones, as some studies have suggested that in such situations we may simply defer to the more plausible. That wasn't the case here.

There are risks to naming a salary first, such as underselling yourself or pricking the sensibilities of the hirer. So using a joke to introduce an anchoring value may be a safer bet. Organisations may of course respond: using clearly defined pay ranges and clear criteria to shape a fair financial offer for a desired candidate. Both parties should take seriously the power of framing the financial borders of a negotiation.

THORSTEINSON, T. (2011). Initiating Salary Discussions With an Extreme Request: Anchoring Effects on Initial Salary Offers1 Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41 (7), 1774-1792 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00779.x

How mixing work incentives put us on the horns of a dilemma

To encourage collaboration, many organisations structure incentives so that whole groups are rewarded – or not - based on their collective output. However, the groups-eye view allows for social loafing, where people shirk duties and assume team-mates will carry their load, so it's tempting to keep everyone accountable by adding incentives to individual performance too. Christopher Barnes and his colleagues set out to see just how these mixed incentives turn out in practice.

The researchers used a computer warfare simulation that examines behaviour in tight, demanding circumstances, where teams of four protect their territories by correctly identifying enemy intruders and then quickly destroying them. Team-mates used separate monitors, but shared a room and could freely converse. They recruited 304 management undergraduates, half of whom were given straightforward group incentives:  $10 each if their group outperformed a specified rival group.

The other teams were given mixed incentives: group performance could lead to $5 each , and individually outdoing a specified member of another team garnered another $5. Participants who were individually incentivised were hungrier for scores, being significantly faster at destroying intruders. However, heavily penalised illegitimate attacks ('friendly fire') were more common in these teams. This slump in quality suggests a drop-off in the flow of information typical in close teams, making it harder to detect and ward off errors as attention was turned towards delivering immediate personal objectives.

The study also examined direct helping behaviour, in terms of the efforts made to destroy intruders in team-mate territory rather than your own. This mattered, as each team had a high workload member who was constantly swarmed with as many radar blips as the others had put together. Participants with pure group-level incentives showed more helping behaviours than their mixed incentive counterparts.

Barnes and his colleagues suggest that mixed incentives  present a conflict between maximising individual interests and that of the collective, and the temptation is to focus on your own priorities, letting others hold the fort for you. Moreover, if you doubt that they will, you'd be even more of a sucker to vainly do so yourself. This amounts to a social dilemma akin to the prisoner's dilemma, which pressurises players towards self-serving behaviours.

I felt - and the authors do note - that the experimental paradigm relates best to 'task forces' whose urgent tasks necessitate trade-offs between different behaviours. I'm skeptical about generalising to workplaces which are more elastic: I may forgo reading my book over lunch in order to help you out, feel rewarded by this, and spend the afternoon contributing just as much or more to my own goals. Nevertheless, by plugging social dilemmas in to the research on incentives, this article highlights that tweaking incentives can result in tradeoffs, not simply the best of both worlds.

Barnes, C., Hollenbeck, J., Jundt, D., DeRue, D., & Harmon, S. (2010). Mixing Individual Incentives and Group Incentives: Best of Both Worlds or Social Dilemma? Journal of Management, 37 (6), 1611-1635 DOI: 10.1177/0149206309360845

What ingredients sweeten Sunday working?

I hope you're having a relaxing weekend. If so, spare a thought for those busy at their jobs, serving in shops, making our meals, or mending wounds. Lacking a sacrosanct day of rest – in much of the West at least – we expect this work to get done... but are reluctant to be the ones doing it. Sunday is the day most workers avoid if they can help it; now, a new study suggests ways to sweeten this bitter pill.

James Martin and colleagues contacted union members working in a retail food chain that often requires Sunday shift-work, using a survey to gather responses from 2000 employees. The researchers were interested in how an employee's satisfaction with their current work schedule relates to other factors, after taking into account considerations such as base pay rate and hours worked.

They found that unsurprisingly people were happier to work Sundays when this came with a salary premium; however, the premium needed to be at least moderate in scale ($2/hour extra, rather than $1/hour). In addition, Sunday workers with more control over their overall schedule were more acceptant of their schedules, as were workers with longer organizational tenure. The latter probably reflects the fact that time in a job offers more opportunities to get out of, negotiate, or make peace with schedules that pose inconveniences.

Martin's team also explored what future benefits could entice Sunday workers into taking further Sunday shifts, and found that this depended on how the workers currently felt. For those already satisfied with their working pattern, the notion of a raise in the Sunday premium was attractive; those currently fed up with their current schedule were much harder to please financially. These individuals thawed towards future Sunday shifts when it came with the prospect of more power over the rest of their schedule: to flex and amend it to fit circumstances, or simply to have more say over it in the first place. It's worth noting that these analyses give insight into how to handle incremental change – working more or fewer Sundays – but have less to say about the introduction of wholly new working schedules, as they did not assess attitudes in non-Sunday workers.

Organisations that depend on work completed in non-standard schedules have to account for the fact that we prefer to do other things with our nights, evenings, and weekends. This research reminds us that although financial incentives do still appeal, we would do better to provide employees more say in when they work. And if you're working today, I hope you have some time off soon when it suits you.



Martin, J., Wittmer, J., & Lelchook, A. (2011). Attitudes towards days worked where Sundays are scheduled Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726710396248

Second-rates and saboteurs: possible consequences of employee of the month schemes?

As the BPS' newest employee, I'm thinking about how to make a good impression on my peers and managers. Perhaps I could even make it to Employee of the Month! "EOM" schemes are highly popular across companies, and considered by many to be best practice, so I was fascinated to find a paper by Johnson and Dickinson that starts to explore the motivational consequences of such schemes.

The studies described in the article seem to me preliminary, with a small student sample and favouring eyeballing over statistical analysis; I'll just touch on them below. The literature review, however, is a real eye-opener, and reveals how much opportunity there is for investigation of this area, with “no published empirical studies on EOM, even within a variety of disciplines such as psychology, management, and economics." Moreover, there are a number of criticisms of EOM design, including:

• A competitive structure. If everyone performs well this month, there's still only one EOM: it pays to do better than others, not to excel together.
• A winner-takes-all design. Small differences in performance may make the difference between acclaim and... tumbleweed. The pretty good and the mediocre are treated the same: they're invisible.
• A focus on results over methods. Getting things done by bulldozing your workmates could be a way to win the award.
• Criteria that are often vague and not transparent.

Some EOM schemes attempt to 'share the wealth' by ensuring the award revolves around to new individuals. This could however dampen any recognition value it has: "I've performed best this month... except for maybe Janet and Khaled, who already got it." The authors investigate this: in their sample of six students they don't see visible improvements on a dull computer-based processing task after being told they have won a revolving award.

A non-revolving scheme however, can end up with one or several great performers hogging the award, leaving the swathe of the 'able middle' unrecognised and unmotivated. Johnson and Dickinson look at this also, in a study where they set up their participants to always come in between 2nd and 5th place behind a named (fictional) "co-worker". Over time, a few of the students tailed off somewhat in performance, but a few others didn't. In my view this research doesn't provide compelling evidence for or against these EOM features, but lays some groundwork for subsequent work: watch this space.

One further risk, deliberately excluded from the research by using fictional teams, is that employees may seek the award via counterproductive work behaviours that could even slip into covert sabotage. If Steve is just one flawless restaurant set-up ahead of me, maybe I'll dawdle the next time he's in charge. This is serious business, and the consequence of EOMs focusing on results over behaviour.

Overall, this paper calls to our attention how shaky the theory and evidence for EOM schemes is, despite their obvious attractions as catchy, memorable, and simple ways to try to recognise employees. Raising the number of awards and a greater focus on behaviours seem supportable steps, but it's also key that organisations look inward to how the schemes are viewed by the employees who participate – or not.

Does your organisation have a EOM scheme? What are your views on its strengths and weaknesses?

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Johnson, D., & Dickinson, A. (2010). Employee-of-the-Month Programs: Do They Really Work? Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 30 (4), 308-324 DOI: 10.1080/01608061.2010.520144