Toward a Sustainable World: Affective Factors Explain How Emotional Salary Influences Different Performance Indicators

The concept of emotional salary refers to the non-monetary rewards granted to workers, focusing on improving interpersonal relationships, strengthening productivity, and enhancing the competitiveness of organizations. The topic of emotional salary is still recent and lacks empirical studies demonstrating its beneficial effects for both workers (e.g., job satisfaction) and organizations (e.g., performance). Therefore, to expand knowledge about the benefits of emotional salary, the present study used the self-determination theory to hypothesize that motivation and satisfaction would serve as affective mechanisms linking emotional salary to workers’ performance. Through a non-experimental correlational study, an online questionnaire was administered to 215 workers from various organizations. The results showed that emotional salary influenced performance (task, contextual, and adaptive) by increasing motivation and job satisfaction. The results also indicated evidence of a serial mediation path between emotional salary, motivation, satisfaction, and then performance. From a management perspective, considering emotional salary as an organizational resource capable of motivating and satisfying workers is a starting point for acknowledging the practical and theoretical importance of this concept, as well as a strategy to contribute to organizational sustainability.