Paying Employees to Quit: An Experimental Study of Sorting and Motivational Effects

We study whether pay-to-quit incentives (i.e., payments offered to employees who resign) can help organizations maintain a workforce of employees who highly identify with the organization. Across a laboratory experiment and an online vignette experiment, we find that pay-to-quit incentives induce employees with lower levels of organizational identification (OI) to leave their organization. Employees with low (high) OI are generally likely (unlikely) to leave the organization regardless of whether a pay-to-quit incentive is offered. As a result, relative to no incentive, the effect of a pay-to-quit incentive on employees’ likelihood of leaving is strongest among employees with moderate OI. We also find that employees who forgo the pay-to-quit incentive subsequently exert higher work effort than before. This research contributes to the rising accounting literature on the sorting effects of incentives by showing that pay-to-quit incentives both help retain highly identified employees and motivate those who remain. Data Availability: Data are available from the authors upon request.