Do financial incentives help or harm performance in interesting tasks?
[abstract only; full text not retrieved, 2026-10-20] Kim, J. H., Gerhart, B., & Fang, M. (2022). 'Do financial incentives help or harm performance in interesting tasks?' Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(1), 153-167. doi:10.1037/apl0000851. The paper that adjudicates the work question. It takes the primary studies from Jenkins and colleagues 1998 and from Weibel and colleagues 2010, which disagree by about nine tenths of a standard deviation on interesting tasks, and re-analyses them together. It finds the incentives-performance relationship positive in interesting tasks by a moderate to large margin and very slightly less so in uninteresting ones, with the relationship less positive where performance is measured as quality, especially in interesting tasks.
[abstract only; full text not retrieved, 2026-10-20] Kim, J. H., Gerhart, B., & Fang, M. (2022). 'Do financial incentives help or harm performance in interesting tasks?' Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(1), 153-167. doi:10.1037/apl0000851. The paper that adjudicates the work question. It takes the primary studies from Jenkins and colleagues 1998 and from Weibel and colleagues 2010, which disagree by about nine tenths of a standard deviation on interesting tasks, and re-analyses them together. It finds the incentives-performance relationship positive in interesting tasks by a moderate to large margin and very slightly less so in uninteresting ones, with the relationship less positive where performance is measured as quality, especially in interesting tasks.
Written from the abstract only; full text not retrieved, 2026-10-20.
What our sources record
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Kim, J. H., Gerhart, B., & Fang, M. (2022). Do financial incentives help or harm performance in interesting tasks? Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(1), 153-167.