The importance of pay in employee motivation: Discrepancies between what people say and what they do

Abstract

Rynes, Colbert, and Brown (2002) presented the following statement to 959 members of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM): "Surveys that directly ask employees how important pay is to them are likely to overestimate pay's true importance in actual decisions" (p. 158). If our interpretation (and that of Rynes et al.) of the research literature is accurate, then the correct true-false answer to the above statement is "false." In other words, people are more likely to underreport than to overreport the importance of pay as a motivational factor in most situations. Put another way, research suggests that pay is much more important in people's actual choices and behaviors than it is in their self-reports of what motivates them, much like the cartoon viewers mentioned in the quote above. Yet, only 35% of the respondents in the Rynes et al. study answered in a way consistent with research findings (i.e., chose "false").Our objective in this article is to show that employee surveys regarding the importance of various factors in motivation generally produce results that are inconsistent with studies of actual employee behavior. In particular, we focus on well-documented findings that employees tend to say that pay

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