We Expect to Be Rewarded for Results, Not Hard Work
Prof. Corey Cusimano and his co-authors ran a series of experiments to understand when people think they deserve to be paid more for completing a task. They found that people felt entitled to a reward when they delivered top results and less so when they invested effort—raising questions about how much we truly value hard work.
If you accidentally stumbled into a solution for a major problem at work, would you turn down an employee-of-the month award? What if you spent hours of work on something trivial, and your boss offered a free lunch as a reward?
Yale SOM marketing professor Corey Cusimano wondered if there are patterns to when people feel they have earned a reward. Does hard work alone justify being compensated, or does success matter more? Would a waiter who struggles in vain to satisfy difficult customers feel as entitled to a hefty tip as one who effortlessly pleases happy diners?
Cusimano and two Yale PhD students, Jin Kim—now a postdoctoral research associate at Northeastern University—and Jared Wong, set out to understand the factors that might make people feel like they deserve the reward. To do this, they gave people work to do, and after, offered them monetary rewards that they could accept or decline.
Their initial guess was that effort was the most important consideration. “We thought if you made people work really hard, they would take money,” he says. “And if you had them perform a really easy task, then you offered money, they’d say, ‘Oh, I didn’t work very hard, I probably shouldn’t take this.’”
Participants were anonymous, and it would have been easy for everyone to take the money without any consequences. But people who thought they did a bad job at the task took pause in taking the money, independent of whether or not they thought the task was easy or hard.
They set out to test their theory with a pilot study using the online labor platform Prolific. Through Prolific’s market, workers take jobs that last just a few minutes and pay about $0.14 to $0.26 per minute. The workers can also get extra pay in the form of bonuses. The initial results were unexpected: workers who put in significant effort were no more likely to feel entitled to rewards than workers who completed an easy task of little effort.
“Everything else that follows in our work is us trying to come to terms with this thing that really surprised us,” says Cusimano. “We thought maybe we’d made a mistake.”
Driving their disbelief was that much of the literature around feelings of entitlement to rewards emphasizes the role of hard work over positive outcomes. So the researchers designed a more extensive study to tease apart the impact of effort and achievement when it comes to people receiving and accepting rewards.
In their new paper, Cusimano, Kim, and Wong find that it’s achievement, or doing well, that strongly predicts how much people end up paying themselves. Working hard, by contrast, played little to no detectable role in how much money study participants believed they deserved.
“It’s very striking,” Cusimano says, “because participants were anonymous, and it would have been easy for everyone to take the money without any consequences. But people who thought they did a bad job at the task took pause in taking the money, independent of whether or not they thought the task was easy or hard.”
In one experiment, the researchers asked Prolific workers to transcribe audio clips. Some workers performed an easy transcription of an academic lecture, and others did a difficult one in which the clip was muffled. The researchers told some workers to choose a bonus between $0.00 and $0.50 based on what’s “financially best for you,” and others to “take what you deserve.” Workers told to take what they deserved took less money overall, and especially if they performed the harder task.
The researchers wanted to see how participants’ behavior might change as tasks became progressively harder. In another experiment, they found that as tasks got more difficult, participants reported doing worse at the task, but working harder. They also paid themselves less. “Achievement appears to be a much more potent cause of subjective entitlement,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Subsequent experiments looked at the role luck played—participants who worked hard still took smaller bonuses even when they knew they got the difficult task by chance—and how participants behaved when they had the choice of a task. In that scenario, most people picked the easy task. Still, those who choose the hard task took smaller bonuses and were less likely to take the maximum amount (62% versus 89% for easy taskers.)
The researchers tasked other participants with “trivially easy” tasks, like transcribing six seconds of audio of Lady Gaga singing the U.S. National Anthem or a seven-second professional recording of “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.” Time and time again across experiments, the researchers’ initial finding held true: feeling successful is a stronger predictor of entitlement to a reward than working hard and performing poorly.
The researchers found no differences among how men and women in the U.S. responded, nor in how Americans and Western Europeans choose to reward themselves.
“Having to put effort into a task does not seem to be a necessary requirement to feel like you deserve some type of reward for how it turns out,” Cusimano says. Common rhetoric in society about the value of hard work might be misplaced, he adds. “We should start to question whether our common and casual way of talking about what we deserve actually does a good job of capturing what we really believe we deserve,” he says.
The study lends itself to plenty of follow-up work, says Cusimano. For example, might people behave differently with projects that span weeks or months at a time? Or if they are collaborating with colleagues rather than completing tasks anonymously?
In new work in progress, Cusimano is studying whether using artificial intelligence to complete tasks that are harder to objectively evaluate—writing a poem or coming up with arguments in favor of political positions—might influence the rewards people think they deserve. “We’re wondering, do our previous conclusions hold? Does using AI in this way end up decreasing people’s sense of entitlement?” he says.