This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Offer your employees money to quit and the ones who say no will work harder as a result. Researchers at the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University and McMaster University set out to test whether pay-to-quit programs work as intended.
Their results confirmed they do and revealed a benefit that nobody anticipated. The study is among the first to empirically examine pay-to-quit incentives, cash bonuses offered to employees who choose to voluntarily resign. Across two experiments, the research team found that choosing to stay when offered a financial incentive to leave translates into stronger performance, and that these programs also effectively filter out less committed employees.
"It is such a counterintuitive practice," says Dr. Kelsey Matthews, a professor at UWaterloo's School of Accounting and Finance (SAF). "Most of what we hear about incentives is how to get people to stay, work harder or perform better, so the idea of offering money for someone to leave immediately raised a really interesting question: Under what circumstances could that genuinely be a smart organizational strategy?" Matthews and her co-authors, Dr.
Lan Guo of Laurier and Dr. Bradley Ruffle of McMaster, ran two experiments. The first used a controlled lab setting with more than 300 undergraduate participants assigned to work for either their own university or a rival institution.
The second recruited actual employees through an online labor market platform and asked them to respond to a scenario in which their company had introduced a pay-to-quit program. The surprise came from the employees who turned the offer down. Rather than feeling resentful that disengaged colleagues were being paid to leave while they received nothing for staying, employees who declined the incentive increased their work effort in the period that followed.
"Going in, we thought it could go either way," Matthews says. "What we found was much more encouraging. When employees actively choose the organization over the cash, that choice can sharpen their sense of belonging and translate into stronger motivation going forward." The researchers think they know why.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
