What is it about?

When does work make employees sick? One longstanding idea is that rewards need to be matched with the effort that employees invest. However, it is unclear what the best methodology is to study this question. In this article, the authors demonstrate that popular and frequently used approaches to study effort-reward balance - the use of ratios - have major limitations. The authors integrate the notion of effort/reward balance with research on employee-environment fit and describe how reseachers can better use quantitative methods to uncover actual misfit between efforts and rewards in empirical datasets from organizations.

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Why is it important?

Organizations have long been interested in understanding what leads to employee well-being, or, in a worst case scenario to employee burnout.

Perspectives

From JWB Lang: My personal take is that effort and reward misfit is an intuitlvely relevant puzzle piece in understanding occupational well-being. The perspective has been popular in the sociological and occupational medicine literature but has been less well received in the occupational psychology literature. One key reason is likely the methodological tools to study the construct have limitations. The purpose of this paper that I wrote and published together with two colleagues (S Van Hoeck and JM Runge) was thus to address these limitations. I am optimistic that the paper can move the field forward and also led to a more balanced view of studies on effort reward fit. Nonetheless, our paper also demonstrates that the field likely needs to go back and revisit and scrutinize some earlier findings because of the methodological issues we described in our paper.

Jonas Lang
University of Exeter

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Methodological and conceptual issues in studying effort-reward fit, Journal of Managerial Psychology, November 2020, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/jmp-11-2019-0659.
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