Aligning Individual Motivations and Organizational Incentives: Charter School Teachers and Pay-for-Performance Incentive Structures

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Abstract

Dual concerns about teacher retention and teacher performance have fueled interest in “pay-for-performance” approaches, which provide fiscal and non-fiscal incentives to teachers who perform well within local accountability systems. Our current study employed an organizational theory lens to examine the relationship between organizational incentive systems and individual motivations within one urban charter management organization’s pay-for-performance system. Interviews with teachers and school leaders revealed that participants were primarily motivated by purposive incentives, even as their organization sought to implement a utilitarian system. This mismatch between organizational incentives and individual motivations helps to explain the primarily neutral or negative teacher perceptions towards the pay-for-performance system and may shed light on previously inconclusive findings regarding the effectiveness of this approach in schools.

Authors

• Shani Shalev Bretas, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Douglas Ready, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Katharine Conn, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Elizabeth Park, Teachers College, Columbia University