The Award Goes To... Someone Else: A Natural Quasi-Experiment Examining the Impact of Performance Awards on Nominees' Workplace Collaboration.

Employee awards programs are prevalent in organizations. This research examines a group of employees who have received relatively less attention in the employee awards literature: those who are nominated for but fail to receive an award. Integrating social comparison theory with the functional theory of counterfactual thinking, we argue that nonwinner nominees go through complex motivational states and affective experiences, which influence their collaboration responsiveness to colleagues. We conducted a field quasi-experiment using 160,830 collaboration records of 494 employees over eight months (Study 1) and a multisource study using survey data and 34,911 collaborative records of 598 employees over two months (Study 2). The results revealed that, compared to non-nominees, nonwinner nominees have lower collaboration responsiveness to winners following the award announcement, especially when they have a higher structural proximity to winners. However, in the long run, nonwinner nominees have higher collaboration responsiveness to others in general. Furthermore, being nominated for but failing to receive an award simultaneously induces nonwinner nominees to experience higher causal-inference counterfactual thinking and negative affect, which exert opposing impacts on nonwinner nominees' collaboration responsiveness. This research advances the understanding of the impact, influencing mechanisms, boundary conditions, and temporal dynamics of employee awards on workplace collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]