The company pays out a bonus pool every quarter and cannot point to a single behavior it changed. Or worse — it changed behavior precisely as designed: the sales team sandbagged pipeline into next quarter because the plan paid them to. Incentives always work; the question is whether they work on what you intended.

Edward Lawler's Rewarding Excellence is built on the expectancy logic that has anchored pay-for-performance research for decades: an incentive motivates only when the whole chain holds — the person believes effort improves the measured performance, believes the measured performance triggers the reward, and values the reward enough to care. Lawler's name for the first link is line of sight, and his claim is that it is where most plans die: a warehouse team paid on company profit has no line of sight, so the plan is an expense, not an incentive. His Strategic Pay walks the design menu — merit pay, individual incentives, gainsharing, profit sharing — and insists that the choice is a strategy-fit decision, and that process (who participates in design, how openly it's communicated) determines whether an identical structure motivates or corrodes.

Gerhart and Rynes's Compensation: Theory, Evidence, and Strategic Implications is the evidence audit, and it corrects folklore in both directions. Against the pay-doesn't-motivate crowd: the research shows money is not a weak motivator, and incentives work through two engines — motivating the people you have, and sorting who joins and stays, an effect designers routinely forget. Against the incentive enthusiasts: rewarded measures get gamed, and the 'risk' knob (how much pay rides on performance) has real costs. And on the famous claim that extrinsic rewards crowd out intrinsic motivation, their reading of the evidence is that it is far less reliable than its reputation — a risk worth checking, not a law of nature. That is the honest posture for a designer: check the expectancy chain, check the gaming surface, and treat crowding-out as a flagged hypothesis rather than a veto.

The books give you the theory and the cautionary tales; here you describe the role, the behaviors, and the budget, and the scheme comes back with every reward trigger scored for line of sight, the effort-to-valence chain checked link by link, and the gaming and crowding-out risks named rather than discovered in production.