When the Going Gets Tough, Do the Incentivized Get Going? A Field Experiment on Uniform Incentives and Reward Attainability in Multitasking Service
Publication Date
8-12-2026
Abstract
Financial incentives are a common tool for improving service-worker performance, especially on difficult tasks. However, firms often apply uniform incentives to broad operational categories whose tasks differ substantially in reward attainability. In multitasking environments, workers may respond to such coarse incentives according to each task's perceived reward attainability rather than the firm's category labels, creating distortions within the incentivized category itself. We examine this possibility using a six-week field experiment in the live-chat customer service operation of a Fortune Global 100 firm. The firm introduced a salient bonus opportunity for resolving difficult customer cases while agents concurrently handled multiple randomly assigned cases of varying difficulty. We find that the bonus improves average performance on incentivized, firm-defined "difficult" cases, increasing customer satisfaction by 5.8% relative to the control-group mean and reducing future recontact for the same issue by 3%. This average effect, however, masks a sharp threshold pattern. Among the most difficult bonus-eligible cases, where reward attainability is lowest, customer satisfaction declines by 24.3% and future recontact increases by 1.1%. In contrast, performance improves for less difficult incentivized cases and spills over to unincentivized, "easy" cases, where customer satisfaction increases by 8.5% and future recontact decreases by 6.7%. These patterns are consistent with workers prioritizing tasks by perceived bonus attainability: the bonus helps difficult-but-attainable cases but induces neglect once attainability falls below a threshold. Higher ability and heavier workloads sharpen this prioritization. The findings suggest that incentive design should account for task attainability, worker ability, and workload.
Document Type
Article
Keywords
Financial incentives, multitasking, service operations, task difficulty, effort allocation, field experiment
Disciplines
Business Administration, Management, and Operations
Source
SMU Cox: IT & Operations Management (Topic)
Language
English
