The demotivating effect (and unintended message) of awards

It is common for organizations to offer awards motivate individual behavior, yet few empirical studies evaluate their effectiveness in the field. We report a randomized field experiment (N = 15,329) that tests impact of two types symbolic awards: pre-announced (prospective) and surprise (retrospective). The context U.S. schools, where we explore how student attendance. Contrary our pre-registered hypotheses organizational leaders’ expectations, prospective did not on average improve retrospective decreased subsequent Moreover, find significant negative effect attendance after incentives were removed, which points crowding-out effect. Survey experiments probing mechanisms suggest may cause these unintended effects by inadvertently signaling target behavior (perfect attendance) neither social norm nor institutionally expected. In addition, receiving award suggests recipients they have already outperformed what was expected them, hence licensing them miss school. Exploratory analyses shed further light differential age performance.