PurposeIn the context of the labor relationship, this paper investigates whether receiving vacation, compared to an equivalent monetary bonus, enhances employees' feelings of humanness.Design/methodology/approachThree preregistered experiments with 2,206 total participants were conducted using recall and vignette methodologies.FindingsReceiving vacation significantly increased employees' feelings of humanness compared to equivalent monetary bonuses. In Study 1, recalling vacation experiences led to greater felt humanness than recalling monetary bonuses. Study 2 showed that hypothetically receiving additional vacation days (vs money) enhanced perceived segmentation, which mediated the positive effect on humanness. Study 3 provided direct causal evidence that greater segmentation during a hypothetical vacation increased felt humanness.Practical implicationsThese findings provide managers with empirical evidence supporting the psychological benefits of offering vacation as a reward. Organizations aiming to enhance employee well-being and reinforce humane workplace values might benefit from incorporating time-based rewards into their incentive structures.Originality/valueThis paper is the first to empirically compare vacation and monetary rewards on perceived humanness. It contributes novel insights into the role of segmentation in reward perception, highlighting the unique advantage of time off in promoting psychological detachment from work and enhancing employees' holistic sense of feeling human.

Americans are time-poor. They work long hours and leave paid vacation days unused. An analysis of over 200,000 U.S. workers reveals that not prioritizing vacation is linked to lower happiness. Many people, however, do not feel they can take vacation due to financial and temporal constraints. How might people enjoy the emotional benefits of vacation without taking additional time off or spending additional money? Three preregistered experiments tested the effect of simply treating the weekend “like a vacation” (vs. “like a regular weekend”) on subsequent happiness—measured as more positive affect, less negative affect, and greater satisfaction when back at work on Monday. Although unable to definitively rule out the role of demand characteristics, the study results suggest that treating the weekend like a vacation can increase happiness, and exploratory analyses show support for the underlying role of increased attention to the present moment.

When people willingly volunteer their time, how does the salience of the opportunity costs of their time influence their experience of the activity? Study 1 uses the American Time Use Survey Well-Being module to examine whether the subjective experience of happiness while volunteering is influenced by how people are paid and the opportunity costs of their time spent volunteering. Among hourly paid workers for whom there is a salient heuristic for the opportunity costs of time, we found that higher opportunity costs of time as indicated by income and duration of the activity were associated with diminished happiness experienced during volunteering. No differences across income and duration emerged among non-hourly workers for whom there was not a salient heuristic for the opportunity costs of time. Using a student population who all volunteered for the same charity activity, Study 2 tested whether making the opportunity costs salient caused less happiness to be reported from the activity than those in the control condition. These studies contribute to our understanding of the psychological consequences of thinking about time in terms of money and how it may influence the hedonic experience of activities people choose to undertake in the applied context of volunteering.

Building on research showing that organizational practices that highlight the monetary value of time can affect decisions about time use, we examined how income and the economic evaluation of time jointly predict decisions about socializing with others who can be instrumentally useful to people (e.g., colleagues). Using a multimethod approach of surveys and experiments, we found that income was a stronger predictor of both the economic value placed upon socializing with colleagues outside of work as well as the propensity to engage in such activities. When the economic value of time was high, individuals weighed the instrumental value of networking more heavily in their decision making about how to allocate time. These findings illustrate how organizational pay practices and the salience of income can influence decisions about daily social interactions outside of work.

Financial incentives are a core feature of most workplaces. The current symposium revisits this common organizational practice and examines how incentive systems – the way one gets paid – shape one’s value system in general, within and outside organizations. The four papers take several different tracks approaching this question and explore different incentive systems and payment schedules to provide a better understanding of the influence of financial incentives on a variety of work and non-work behaviors. The first paper investigates the effect of being exposed to performance-based incentives and finds that individuals receiving performance incentives develop an attentional fixation on money and are less likely to make environmentally sustainable decisions. The second paper explores how receiving volatile and uncertain incentives can have a detrimental psychological impact of reducing one’s sense of control and increasing impatience. The third paper develops a new theoretical model on how incentive systems affect unethical behavior, incorporating three different perspectives on goals, monetary rewards, and social influence. Finally, the fourth paper proposes one potential intervention to shift employees’ attention away from financial incentives, which can undermine environmental behavior, increase impatience, and influence morality according to the other three papers, and nudge individuals to seek non-financial incentives by providing cash value of the non-financial incentives. Taken together, these papers provide insight into unintended but crucial consequences of the common incentive systems and the way that these common incentive systems are framed, providing actionable implications for mangers and generating future research questions by academics. Money Cannot be Green: The Impact of Performance Incentives on Financial Concerns and Sustainability Presenter: Julia D. Hur; New York U. Presenter: Yuan Tian; Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Experiencing Income Volatility Leads to Impatience Presenter: Colin West; UCLA Anderson School of Management Presenter: Sanford Ely DeVoe; UCLA The Incentive Stain: The Mechanisms and Conditions of Incentive Effects on Unethical Behavior Presenter: Tae-Youn Park; Vanderbilt U. Presenter: Sanghee Park; Rutgers U. Presenter: Bruce Barry; Vanderbilt U. Placing a Monetary Value on Non-Cash Compensation Encourages Employees to Value Time over Money Presenter: Ashley Whillans; Harvard Business School Presenter: Jaewon Yoon; Harvard Business School Presenter: Allan Schweyer; Incentive Research Foundation

Previous examinations of environmental stressors in organizations have mostly emphasized their dysfunctional effects on individuals' emotions and behaviors. Extending this work by drawing from the social functional perspective on emotion, we propose that customers' negative emotional responses to environmental stressors in organizations can exert both dysfunctional and functional effects on customer-employee interactions. Specifically, we theorize that situational and physiological forms of environmental stressors can be dysfunctional by incurring customer anger, precipitating customer aggression, and diminishing employee helpfulness. We further theorize that situational relative to physiological stressors can exert functional effects in inducing customer fear that elicits empathy and helpfulness from employees. We test our model via an archival, observational, and critical incident yoked experimental study set in the airport context. This research contributes to stress theory and its organizational application by integrating theory from the social functional approach to emotion with appraisal-based theories of stress in organizations.

Putting a monetary price on time can have powerful psychological consequences. I review the recent literature examining the psychological consequences of thinking about time in terms of money and the role organizational practices play in highlighting this connection in people's lives. Over a decade of research shows payment practices highlighting the time/money connection have implications for how people make decisions to trade their free time to earn more money, volunteer their time, and socialize with their colleagues off the job. Given the proliferation of hourly payment as well as the larger gig economy, there is a clear need for future research to ascertain the consequences for individual's happiness and the spillover between work and non-work spheres.

We examine how pay practices, such as hourly payment, that promote an economic evaluation of time affect people’s choices about with whom to socialize off the job. Using multiple waves of the American Time Use Survey, Study 1a found people paid by the hour spent more time and a greater percentage of their total socializing outside of work in the presence of colleagues, with these effects occurring primarily for high earners for whom time was the most economically valuable. Study 1b eliminated some alternative explanations for this finding by showing that people reported experiencing less happiness while socializing with colleagues than when socializing with family or friends, with no differences observed in experienced happiness as a function of either the economic value of time or whether people were paid by the hour. In a large representative online sample, Study 2 conceptually replicated the findings of Study 1a. Hourly respondents and non-hourly participants experimentally prompted to economically evaluate their time by calculating their approximate hourly wage exhibited highly similar patterns in their intentions to socialize with colleagues outside of work. In addition to offering causal evidence for economic evaluation, mediation analyses indicated that it was through emphasizing professional usefulness over enjoyment in socializing decisions that explained these differences in intentions. The findings show how organizational practices promoting economic evaluation can affect people’s choice of with whom to spend time off the job, with potential implications for both happiness and career trajectories.

Does planning for a particular workday help employees perform better than on other days they fail to plan? We investigate this question by identifying 2 distinct types of daily work planning to explain why and when planning improves employees' daily performance. The first type is time management planning (TMP)-creating task lists, prioritizing tasks, and determining how and when to perform them. We propose that TMP enhances employees' performance by increasing their work engagement, but that these positive effects are weakened when employees face many interruptions in their day. The second type is contingent planning (CP) in which employees anticipate possible interruptions in their work and plan for them. We propose that CP helps employees stay engaged and perform well despite frequent interruptions. We investigate these hypotheses using a 2-week experience-sampling study. Our findings indicate that TMP's positive effects are conditioned upon the amount of interruptions, but CP has positive effects that are not influenced by the level of interruptions. Through this study, we help inform workers of the different planning methods they can use to increase their daily motivation and performance in dynamic work environments.

Cognitive science is basically the study of the psychological behavior of the tasks and the processes that human mind usually performs. It can be used to develop the computational models that are used to study the next sequential step, taken with the help of intelligence (artificial intelligence) which is derived mathematically. Python is a powerful tool that can be used for this cognitive science research where it is used for modeling the intelligence either mathematically or analytically. The tool can help increase the understanding of the developers of data by using a tree-like structure. The tree-like structure can be empathized as a neuron that can form clusters and have complex activities, which can be used for implementation. There are many other methods to represent data such as matrices and graphs, used in order to represent neural network. The neurons can be considered transistors or silicon chips that can be used to process data on the basis of programing, and similar results can be achieved what a normal human brain does. A Bayesian framework has been used to compare between the users and the data that can be processed cognitively by neurons.

Erectile dysfunction is a major complication affecting the quality of life of patients and partners after radical prostatectomy. Evolving evidence suggests that early penile rehabilitation may provide better erectile function after surgery. Phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE-5) inhibitors are routinely considered a first-line treatment option in most algorithms for penile rehabilitation owing to their efficacy, ease of use, wide availability and minimal morbidity. Tadalafil is a long-acting, potent PDE-5 inhibitor for erectile dysfunction, with demonstrated effect in animal studies at preserving penile smooth muscle content and prevention of fibrosis of cavernosal tissue. This article evaluates the existing literature on tadalafil and critically analyzes its impact on erectile function following radical prostatectomy.

We tested whether exposure to the ultimate symbols of an impatience culture-fast food-undermines people's ability to experience happiness from savoring pleasurable experiences. Study 1 found that the concentration of fast-food restaurants in individuals' neighborhoods predicted their tendencies to savor. Study 2 revealed that exposure to fast-food primes impeded participants' ability to derive happiness from pictures of natural beauty. Study 3 showed that priming fast food undermined positive emotional responses to a beautiful melody by inducing greater impatience, measured by both subjective perception of time passage and self-reports of impatience experienced during the music. Together, these studies show that as pervasive symbols of impatience, fast food can inhibit savoring, producing negative consequences for how we experience pleasurable events.

This symposium proposal is for a conversation between scholars from different disciplines on the effect of providing strong financial incentives for knowledge and creative workers (in research-intensive industries, health, education, and the arts). Different approaches and empirical studies have made very different conclusions as of whether standard, high-powered economic incentives enhance the performance of these activities or, conversely, inhibit them leading to crowding-out effects). Current theories and empirical evidence will be discussed, with the aim of advancing a common framework and set of methodologies to further our understanding of the motivations for complex activities.

We investigated whether the prevalence of fast-food restaurants in the social ecology are associated with greater financial impatience at the national, neighborhood, and individual level. Study 1 shows that the proliferation of fast-food restaurants over the past 3 decades in the developed world was associated with a historic shift in financial impatience, as manifested in precipitously declining household savings rates. Study 2 finds that households saved less when living in neighborhoods with a higher concentration of fast-food restaurants relative to full-service restaurants. With a direct measure of individuals' delay discounting preferences, Study 3 confirms that a higher concentration of fast-food restaurants within one's neighborhood is associated with greater financial impatience. In line with a causal relationship, Study 4 reveals that recalling a recent fast-food, as opposed to full-service, dining experience at restaurants within the same neighborhood induced greater delay discounting, which was mediated behaviorally by how quickly participants completed the recall task itself. Finally, Study 5 demonstrates that pedestrians walking down the same urban street exhibited greater delay discounting in their choice of financial reward if they were surveyed in front of a fast-food restaurant, compared to a full-service restaurant. Collectively, these data indicate a link between the prevalence of fast food and financial impatience across multiple levels of analysis, and suggest the plausibility of fast food having a reinforcing effect on financial impatience. The present investigation highlights how the pervasiveness of organizational cues in the everyday social ecology can have a far-ranging influence.

The authors investigate how the amount and source of income affects the importance placed on money. Using a longitudinal analysis of the British Household Panel Survey and evidence from two laboratory experiments, they found that larger amounts of money received for labor were associated with individuals placing greater importance on money; but this effect did not hold for money not related to work. The longitudinal survey analysis demonstrated these differential effects of the source of income on money's importance while holding constant stable individual differences. The experiments provide causal evidence that the source of income has an effect on the importance of money as well as on the effort expended to earn more money. The authors' results suggest that, even as individual differences in the importance placed on money may affect peoples' income, depending on its source, income can also affect the importance people place on money.

The authors investigate how both the amount and source of income affects the importance placed on money using a longitudinal analysis of the British Household Panel Survey and evidence from two laboratory experiments. Larger amounts of money received for labor were associated with individuals placing greater importance on money, but this effect did not hold for money unrelated to work. The longitudinal survey analysis demonstrated these differential effects of the source of income on money’s importance while holding constant stable individual differences. The experiments provide evidence that the source of income has a causal effect on the importance of money as well as on the effort expended to earn more money. Even as individual differences in the importance placed on money may affect peoples’ income, our results suggests that, depending upon its source, income can also affect the importance people place on money.