And the winner is…? The motivating power of employee awards

This paper reports the findings from a survey experiment conducted online at IBM to assess the impact of employee awards on behavior in the workplace. We document that the introduction of a hypothetical award has statistically significant effects on the stated willingness to contribute to a public good. Our design allows us to estimate the impact of different award characteristics related to, for example, how public or how valuable the award is. The stated willingness to share important information with colleagues increases monotonically with the value of the monetary payment or gift that comes with the award and is lower for gifts than payments of equal value. Moreover, publicity has a substantial positive effect: a ceremony increases stated contributions by as much as increasing the value of the award from $0 to $1000.