Impact of Team-Based Rewards on Quality and Efficiency Performance: The Mediation Effect of Cooperative and Competitive Efforts

The advantage of team-based rewards is their promotion of team collaboration, but they may have a tendency to suppress the members' efforts. Researchers cannot clearly explain the mechanism of action of team rewards until now, so this paper tries to explain it from the perspective of quality performance and efficiency performance, with introducing the mediation effects of cooperative efforts and competitive efforts. By investigating 106 work teams, it is found that team rewards have a positive effect on team quality performance and have a negative effect on team efficiency. Moreover, cooperative efforts mediate the effect of team rewards on quality performance, and competitive efforts mediate the effect of team rewards on efficiency performance. Task interdependence enhances both of the effects. Therefore, individual rewards are beneficial to teams that pursue efficiency, and team rewards are good for teams that pursues quality.