Incentives in the Age of Knowledge Work

When the fit between HR practices backfires: Exploring the interaction effects between rewards for and appraisal of knowledge behaviours on innovation

“…Moreover, knowledge behaviours are often to some extent discretionary or extra-role, i.e. fully dependent on the employees goodwill to engage in them, which adds to the difficulty of facilitating such behaviours via organisational incentives (Wasko and Faraj, 2005;Gagné, 2009;Kuvaas et al, 2012;Minbaeva et al, 2012;Lerchenmueller and Nembhard, 2015). At the same time, these characteristics create challenges for employees, as they have to navigate ambiguities of what and how they can, should or should not do with knowledge in order to be successful in their careers in the organisation (e.g., Alvesson, 2001).…”

“…Research has widely recognised the tensions around rewards for both knowledge creation (e.g. Amabile, 1996;Li et al, 2016;Sue-Chan and Hempel, 2016) and knowledge sharing (Foss et al, 2015;Lerchenmueller and Nembhard, 2015;Andreeva and Sergeeva, 2016). Some of the explanations for inconsistent findings regarding the effect of rewards on knowledge behaviours suggest that additional contextual factors, in particular, organisational conditions, have to be considered to understand this effect (e.g.…”

“…This reduces ambiguity of rewards for them (Foss et al, ) and also triggers even more goal‐oriented efforts, where employees will be consciously striving to share more knowledge, suggest new ideas, etc. (Lerchenmueller and Nembhard, ). Thus, the combination of rewards and appraisal will likely give a clear direction for employees of what knowledge is valuable to share and what sort of new knowledge is valuable to create.…”