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The Effects of Piece‐Rate Underpayment and Overpayment on Job Performance: A Test of Equity Theory with a New Induction Procedure 1
Author(s) -
Garland Howard
Publication year - 1973
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1973.tb02399.x
Subject(s) - equity (law) , equity theory , psychology , test (biology) , social psychology , proofreading , economics , demographic economics , actuarial science , microeconomics , biology , law , political science , economic justice , paleontology , biochemistry , polymerase , gene
An experiment was designed to test the following hypotheses derived from Equity Theory: (I) Underpaid pieceworkers will produce more work of lower quality than equitably paid pieceworkers and (II) Overpaid pieceworkers will produce less work of higher quality than equitably paid pieceworkcrs. Thirty‐six males and 36 females were hired for a 1‐hour proofreading job. Subjects were assigned randomly to receive 15, 30, or 60 cents per page. All subjects met another worker (really a confederate) who revealed that he was receiving 30 cents per page. This produced three experimental conditions: underpayment, equity, and overpayment. The principal dependent variables were number of pages read and proportion of errors detected by subjects. In general, the results provide strong support for Equity Theory. Males and females both performed in a manner consistent with the hypotheses, although females did tend to react less intensely than did males when overpaid.