Research shows that in practice, supervisors without any constraints to their compensation setting behavior often tend to provide lenient performance evaluations to employees. Economic theory criticizes this outcome because leniency is thought to provide lower motivation to exert effort for low and medium as well as high performers. To provide incentives for employees to exert effort, economic theory calls for a distributed compensation approach that ensures employee performance differences lead to compensation differences. This call ignores insights from psychology and specifically from social determination theory (SDT). Using a real-effort experiment, we find that lenient evaluations lead to lower performance than distributed evaluations when performance is measured precisely. However, lenient evaluations lead to higher effort and performance than distributed evaluations when employee performance is measured imprecisely. We show, using a process model, that the positive effect of leniency for imprecise performance measurement on employee performance results from higher levels of task enjoyment, consistent with SDT. Our findings suggest that organizations need to consider the leniency of compensation as well as performance measurement precision jointly to achieve optimal employee effort and performance.

研究表明，在实践中，对薪酬设定行为没有任何约束的主管往往倾向于对员工提供宽松的绩效评估。经济理论批评了这一结果，因为宽大政策被认为会降低低绩效、中等绩效和高绩效者努力的动力。为了激励员工付出努力，经济理论要求采用分布式薪酬方式，确保员工绩效差异导致薪酬差异。这种说法忽略了心理学，特别是社会决定理论（SDT）的见解。通过真实的努力实验，我们发现，当精确测量性能时，宽松的评估会导致性能低于分布式评估。然而，当员工绩效衡量不精确时，宽松的评估会比分布式评估带来更高的努力和绩效。我们使用过程模型表明，对不精确绩效衡量的宽大处理对员工绩效的积极影响来自于更高水平的任务享受，这与 SDT 一致。我们的研究结果表明，组织需要共同考虑薪酬的宽松性以及绩效衡量的准确性，以实现最佳的员工努力和绩效。