How workers respond to social rewards: evidence from community health workers in Uganda

This paper investigates the effect of a non-financial incentive-a competitive annual award-on community health workers' (CHWs) performance, an issue in the public health literature that has not been explored to its potential. Combining data on a competitive social 'Best CHW' award with the monthly performance of 4050 CHWs across Uganda, we examined if introducing social recognition awards improved the performance of CHWs. In contrast to predominant explanations about the effect of awards on motivation, our first multilevel mixed-effect models found that an award within a branch (consisting of ∼30 CHWs) was negatively associated with the performance of the local peers of the winning CHW. Models focused on non-winning branch offices revealed two additional findings. First, a branch showed underperformance if a CHW from any of the three neighbouring branches won an award in the previous year, with average monthly performance scores dropping by 27 percentage points. Second, this negative association was seen only in the top 50th percentile of CHWs. The bottom 50th percentile of CHWs exhibited increased performance by 13 percentage points. These counter-intuitive results suggest that the negative response from high performers might be explained by their frustration of not winning the award or by emotions such as envy and jealousy generated by negative social comparisons. Our results suggest that more fine-grained examination of data pertaining to motivators for CHWs in low-income countries is needed. Motivational incentives like awards may need to be customized for higher- and lower-performing CHWs.

When Does Status Turn Into Proactive Helping Behavior? The Moderating Role of Cooperative/Competitive Behavior Intention

Self-perceived status is considered an important antecedent of an employee’s extra-role behavior. However, the relationship between self-perceived status and “proactive helping” has been neglected in previous human resource management (HRM) research. Data were collected from 214 employees and their supervisors in two waves of dyads. The results of hierarchical regression analysis indicated that self-perceived status is positively related to proactive helping behavior, while cooperative and competitive behavior intentions were both found to have a moderating effect on the relationship between self-perceived status and proactive helping behavior. Specifically, the relationship between self-perceived status and proactive helping behavior became stronger as the cooperative behavior intention increased, but weakened as competitive behavior intention increased. These conclusions indicate that organizations should guide employees to enhance their cooperative behavior intention or decrease their competitive behavior intention, which may increase their willingness to proactively help others. The study’s theoretical and practical contributions and future research are discussed.

Status competition, inequality, and fertility: implications for the demographic transition

The role that social status plays in small-scale societies suggests that status may be important for understanding the evolution of human fertility decisions, and for understanding how such decisions play out in modern contexts. This paper explores whether modelling competition for status--in the sense of relative rank within a society--can help shed light on fertility decline and the demographic transition. We develop a model of how levels of inequality and status competition affect optimal investment by parents in the embodied capital (health, strength, and skills) and social status of offspring, focusing on feedbacks between individual decisions and socio-ecological conditions. We find that conditions similar to those in demographic transition societies yield increased investment in both embodied capital and social status, generating substantial decreases in fertility, particularly under conditions of high inequality and intense status competition. We suggest that a complete explanation for both fertility variation in small-scale societies and modern fertility decline will take into account the effects of status competition and inequality.