Do you get what you pay for? Sales incentives and implications for motivation and changes in turnover intention and work effort

This study investigated relations between pay-for-performance incentives designed to vary in instrumentality (annual pay-for-performance, quarterly pay-for-performance, and base pay level) and employee outcomes (self-reported work effort and turnover intention) in a longitudinal study spanning more than 2 years. After controlling for perceived instrumentality, merit pay increase, and the initial values of the dependent variables, the amount of base pay was positively related to work effort and negatively related to turnover intention, where both relationships were mediated by autonomous motivation. The amounts of quarterly and annual pay-for-performance were both positively related to controlled motivation, but were differently related to the dependent variables due to different relations with autonomous motivation.     

Predicting Treatment Response in Older Adults with Insomnia

This study examined potential predictors of treatment outcome in late-life insomnia. Fifty-four older adults with chronic insomnia were treated with cognitive–behavior therapy (CBT), pharmacotherapy (PCT), or combined CBT plus PCT. Pretreatment characteristics such as demographic, clinical, psychometric, and sleep variables were examined as correlates or potential predictors of treatment response. Treatment response was defined by posttreatment sleep efficiency as measured subjectively by daily sleep diary and objectively by polysomnography. The results indicate that age, insomnia duration, medical illness, and previous use of sleep medications can moderate subjective or objective treatment outcome or both of these in late-life insomnia. However, there are no reliable predictors of outcome across all treatment and assessment modalities. The implications of these findings for the treatment of insomnia in older adults seen in primary care settings are discussed.     

Putting the pieces together: reviewing the structural conceptualization of motivation within SDT

Motivation and Emotion - Self-determination theory presents a multi-dimensional approach to human motivation in which motivation is driven by a range of classifiably distinct regulation styles....     

Relation priming in established compounds: facilitation?

Gagné and Spalding (Brain and Language, 90, 478–486, 2004, Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 20–35, 2009) have shown that the difficulty of interpreting an established compound (e.g., snowball) can be influenced by recent exposure to a compound with the same modifier and that this influence depends on the relation linking the constituents of the compound. For example, snowball (a ball made of snow) was processed more quickly following snowfort (a fort made of snow; same relation) than following snowshovel (a shovel for snow; different relation). In three experiments, we investigated the basis of this relation-priming effect. The results indicated that the relation-priming effect in established compounds is due to slower processing in the different-relation condition rather than to faster processing in the same-relation condition. These results pose a challenge for most models of compound-word processing.     

An investigation of the unique,synergistic and balanced relationships between basic psychological needs and intrinsic motivation

The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate the relationship between psychological need satisfaction and intrinsic motivation as proposed by self‐determination theory. Three competing hypotheses regarding the relations between need satisfaction and intrinsic motivation were tested: additive, synergistic, and balance. Two cross‐sectional studies involving 1,254 employees from a broad range of Norwegian service organizations partly supported the first two hypotheses. Although the relationship between satisfaction of the needs for autonomy and relatedness with intrinsic motivation were significant, the one with satisfaction of the need for competence was not. Instead, competence was only related to intrinsic motivation when autonomy was high. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.     

Priming relations in ambiguous noun-noun combinations

We conducted two experiments to examine whether the interpretation of an ambiguous noun phrase is influenced by exposure to a similar combination. In Experiment 1, we found that it was easier to verify a definition for a combination (e.g., adolescent doctor, a doctor for adolescents) when the prime used the same relation as the target (e.g., adolescent magazine, a magazine for adolescents; animal doctor, a doctor for animals) than when the prime used a different relation (e.g., country doctor; adolescent experience). In Experiment 2, we found that the interpretation generated for an ambiguous combination was affected by prior exposure to sentences containing a combination with the same modifier or head noun as the target combination. The data are inconsistent with key predictions of schema-based theories of conceptual combination. Although the results do not contradict key assumptions of relation-based theories, modifications to these theories are required to account for these data.     

Effects of immediacy of feedback and level of aspiration statements on learning tasks for delinquent youngsters

The performance of institutionalized delinquent youngsters on paired associate learning tasks was investigated to determine whether level of aspiration (LOA) statements were associated with improved performance under varying feedback conditions. The effects of the feedback conditions were also examined. Forty-eight male adolescents were randomly assigned to the following six treatment conditions: (1) Delayed Feedback, (2) Delayed Feedback with LOA, (3) Immediate Feedback, (4) Immediate Feedback with LOA, (5) No Feedback, (6) No Feedback with LOA. The LOA conditions produced significantly better performance than did the no-LOA conditions. Implications for curricular intervention are discussed.     

Helpful Self-Control: Autonomy Support, Vitality, and Depletion

Why someone exerts self-control may influence how depleting a task is. Feeling compelled to exert self-control require more self-control strength than exerting self-control for more autonomous reasons. Across three experiments, individuals whose autonomy was supported while exerting self-control performed better on a subsequent test of self-control as compared to individuals who had more pressure placed upon them while exerting self-control. The differences in self-control performance were not due to anxiety, stress, unpleasantness, or reduced motivation among the controlled participants. Additional analyses suggested that the decline in self-control performance was mediated by subjective vitality. Feelings of autonomy support lead to enhanced feelings of subjective vitality. This increased vitality may help replenish lost ego-strength, which lead to better self-control performance subsequently.     

CARIN theory reanalysis reanalyzed: a comment on Maguire, Devereux, Costello, and Cater (2007)

P. Maguire, B. Devereux, F. Costello, and A. Cater discussed the Gagné and Shoben (1997) CARIN theory of conceptual combination and, after presenting a sample drawn from the British National Corpus and comparing the two corpora, concluded that the Gagné and Shoben corpus is too small and unrepresentative. They then discussed the mathematical model presented by Gagné and Shoben and claimed that the model does not incorporate relational competition. In this article, the authors present critical aspects of the mathematical model not considered by Maguire et al. and show that the mathematical instantiation of CARIN presented by Gagn and Shoben is, in fact, very sensitive to the number of strong competing relations. The authors then present some new comparisons between the corpora, showing that they correspond surprisingly well.