The Importance of Pay in Employee Motivation: Discrepancies Between What People Say and What They Do

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“The Importance of Pay in Employee Motivation: Discrepancies Between What People Say and What They Do” was written by Sara Rynes, Barry Gerhart, and Kathleen Minette to discuss pay as an important motivator to employees. The article explains why most of the notions about pay as a motivator are being underestimated, especially by the top decision makers and HR professionals in an organization. “What People Say and What They Do”, as stated in the title, refers to the inconsistencies between what people say, as reflected in surveys, and what they do, as observed in studies of actual employee behavior about the importance of pay and its effects on their work performance. “There appears to be a consistent (but incorrect) message to practitioners that pay is not a very effective motivator…” (Rynes, Gerhart, & Minette, n.d., p. 382) This consistency in communicating the message, through surveys and journals, is inconsistent with the observations on employees’ behavior towards pay and motivation. One of the reasons why practitioners undervalue pay as an important motivator, as cited in the article, is because data that are presented to them show so. Results of what employees respond to certain survey questions would probably present the perception of employees. But, the idea of socially desirable responding plays an important role on how and what the employees’ responses are. In the surveys conducted regarding motivators for employees, results show that pay or incentives are far less important than other motivating factors. Nunnally and Bernstein (as cited in Rynes, Gerhart, and Minette, 2004) defines socially desirable responding as the tendency to choose items that reflect societally approved behaviors. In the case of the employees, they may have opted to consider money as less important due to the social norms that view money as a less noble source of motivation

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