Bakgrund och syfte: Tidigare forskning tyder på att det är viktigt med icke-finansiella belöningar för att uppnå inre motivation och arbetstillfredsställelse hos medarbetare. Syftet med denna studie är att skapa förståelse för om medarbetares arbetstillfredsställelse påverkas av icke-finansiella belöningar med avseende på karriärutveckling och flexibelt arbete.   Metod: Studien har ett hermeneutiskt och socialkonstruktivistiskt perspektiv. Vår forskningsansats är abduktiv. Vi har tillämpat kvalitativ forskning med hjälp av semistrukturerade intervjuer för att samla in vår empiriska data. Den teoretiska referensramen är baserad på tidigare forskning. Den empiriska delen bygger på sammanfattningar från intervjuerna. I studien har vi analyserat tidigare forskning tillsammans med den empiriska datan.   Slutsats: Vår studie tyder på att icke-finansiella belöningar påverkar medarbetares arbetstillfredsställelse, främst när det gäller karriärutveckling och flexibelt arbete som vi valt att fokusera på. Studien belyser en ny term av begreppet karriärutveckling vilket är personlig utveckling.   Förslag till fortsatt forskning: För vidare forskning föreslår vi att bygga vidare på vår kvalitativa studie baserat på ett ledningsperspektiv, att få ökad förståelse för hur chefer använder belöningssystem. Ett annat förslag är att gå in på djupet och studera den nya generationen som är mer benägna att få bekräftelse och återkoppling i samband med att de har vuxit upp med sociala medier. Genom det få en bättre förståelse för hur chefer arbetar för att locka till sig den nya generationen.   Studiens bidrag: Denna studie bidrar ur teoretisk synpunkt till att vikten av icke-finansiella belöningar är av betydelse för medarbetares arbetstillfredsställelse. Ur praktisk synvinkel föreslår vi att det är av betydelse att chefer fokuserar på att kommunicera vilka belöningar som finns på arbetet och hur de uppnås. Genom att använda icke-finansiella belöningar, särskilt utveckling och flexibelt arbete, kan det bidra till mer nöjda medarbetare. Det leder även till lägre kostnader för företaget. / Aim: Previous research suggests that it is important for non-financial rewards to achieve internal motivation and job satisfaction with employees. The purpose of this study is to create an understanding of how employees' job satisfaction is affected by non-financial rewards in terms of clear career development and flexible work.   Method: The study has a hermeneutic and social constructivist perspective. Our research method is abductive. We have applied ourselves to qualitative research using semi-structured interviews to collect our empirical data. The theoretical frame of reference is based on previous research. The Empirical study is based on summaries from the interviews. In the study we have analyzed the previous theory along with the empirical data.   Conclusions: Our study suggests that non-financial rewards affect employees' job satisfaction, primarily with regard to career development and flexible work that we have chosen to focus on. The study highlights a new term of the term career development which is more personal development that is important.   Suggestion for future research: For further research, we propose to build on our qualitative study based on management perspective. Get an increased understanding of how managers use the remuneration reward system. Another suggestion is to go into more depth and study the new generation who are more likely to get confirmation and feedback related to the fact that they have grown up with social media. To get a better understanding of how managers work to attract the new generation.   Contribution of the thesis: This study contributes from a theoretical point of view highlighting the importance of the non-financial rewards to the employee's job satisfaction. From a practical point of view, we propose that managers focus on communicating what rewards are at work and how they are achieved. By using non-financial rewards, and especially development and flexible work, it can contribute to more satisfied employees, which also leads to lower costs for the company.

Hur kan organisationer behålla och attrahera medarbetare genom belöningar och förmåner? Hur kan vi som personalvetare bidra inom området? Detta behandlar denna studie som genomfördes genom en metodkombination där intervjuer och en enkätundersökning gjordes. Syftet med studien är att identifiera vilka belöningar och förmåner det finns på två IT-företag och se vilka av dem som attraherar medarbetare inom IT-branschen. Tre frågeställningar formades, där syftet var att ta reda på vilka belöningar och förmåner som finns, undersöka vilka likheter och skillnader gällande belöningar och förmåner som identifieras mellan de två IT-företagen samt undersöka hur belöningar och förmåner påverkar arbetsgivarens attraktivitet. Den teoretiska referensramen består av olika teorier gällande belöningar och förmåner, motivationsteorier samt teorier gällande arbetsgivarens attraktivitet. Studien resulterade i diskussion, förbättringsförslag samt slutsatser med hjälp av relevanta teorier inom området. De två IT-företagen har liknande belöningar och förmåner och en slutsats är att dessa påverkar arbetsgivarens attraktivitet. Med grund av denna slutsats är det viktigt att personalvetare och ledning förstår vikten att belöningarnas och förmånernas påverkan på attraktiviteten. / How can organizations retain and attract employees by rewards and benefits? And how can we as human resource managers contribute? This is what the study is about which was performed by a method combination where interviews and a survey was done. The purpose of this study is to identify which rewards and benefits are available in two IT-companies and explore which of them attracts employees in the IT-industry. Three issues were designed, where the purpose was to find out which rewards and benefits are available at the two companies, examine the companies’ similarities and differences and see how these rewards and benefits affect the employer´s attractiveness. The theoretical reference consists theories about rewards and benefits, motivation and employer attractiveness. The study led to discussion, improvement proposals and conclusions with the help of relevant theories in the area. The two IT-companies have similar rewards and benefits and a conclusion is made that these affect employer attractiveness. Because of this conclusion it is important that human resource managers and management understand the importance of the affect that they have on attractivity.

Organisations accept the fact that innovation is a crucial element in achieving long-term competitive advantage. The key business challenge, however, lies in acquiring the expertise and methodologies needed to effectively motivate, support and nurture innovation. South African companies in particular are performing poorly in developing effective reward strategies to encourage and motivate innovation. This research therefore investigates the critical success factors for rewarding and motivating innovation in the workplace. The results of this study should assist executive managers to formulate reward strategies to stimulate innovation. In line with qualitative research methodological principles, this study followed an exploratory approach to investigating the important factors in rewarding innovation. A total of 15 in-depth interviews were held with executive managers within the Financial Services sector. The sample represented a diverse group of highly successful business leaders, including General Managers (such as CEOs), Human Resource practitioners (such as HR directors) and Innovation Leaders (such as R&D leaders). Key findings reflect that a multi-faceted reward strategy is required to motivate innovation. This includes financial rewards, non-financial rewards, learning and development opportunities, as well as specific elements within the work environment. Leadership was found to be a critical success factor in the implementation of an effective total reward strategy. The research allowed for the development of a framework outlining the critical success factors for rewarding and motivating innovation in the workplace. This is believed to be a useful tool for senior managers who wish to develop a total reward strategy to increase the level of innovation within their organisations. This study also contributes to the body of academic knowledge by clarifying the relationship between innovation and the notion of total reward, which was identified as a gap in the literature. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / ccgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

The topic of this thesis is reward management and its application in a small-sized IT enterprise. Its goals are to properly document and describe current reward system in the company, evaluate the system and recommend improvements for the system. The first two goals are reached via thorough research of the company through semi-structured interviews, employee satisfaction survey, participant observation and document examination and the last one by applying principles from the current literature and education to the results of the two previous goals. The findings are that the reward system, despite growing organically instead of designed, is relatively effective in some areas, but needs improvement in other areas. The main improvement areas are motivation by contingent pay, communication management and performance management. Relatively well working rewards are especially non-financial reward connected to the work environment and work itself.

Much work has been done in the neuroscience of reward processing, such as; mapping brain areas, key neurotransmitters, and connectivity patterns related to different aspects of reward-related behavior. There are a lot of suggested behavioral and neural sex differences in reward processing, primarily based on animal studies of reward behavior. This review aimed to systematically review publications on human neurofunctional sex differences in reward processing, and provide a more stable footing for future research in the field. Two searches through Web of Science and Scopus for publications that combined neuroimaging with behavioral tasks for examining functional sex differences in neural reward processing. The searches produced nine studies (n=9) that were included after the screening process. There are significant differences between males and females in reward processing, specifically in the striatum, orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens, and insula. However, the full extent of these differences, and the underlying causes, are still not clear. There is a lack of control for important confounding factors in the present field of sex differences in reward processing. Future research in this field has to consider all of the underlying factors that cause men and women to differ, such as the impact of gonadal hormone fluctuations and societal pressures. If these factors were taken into account, data of higher validity and generalizability could have been produced.

An emerging body of research has focused on cryptocurrencies and loyalty programs; nevertheless, there is still a significant knowledge void and potential for more investigation into this field and the relation between them. Research has given a limited amount of attention to the role that cryptocurrencies play, even though cryptocurrencies have the potential to radically alter the nature of value perception, which is an essential component of the design of any loyalty program. As a primary research gap, we argue that limited attention has been paid to how incorporating cryptocurrencies, as the reward of a loyalty program, can influence the effectiveness of that program, which is translated as customer loyalty. This thesis pays attention to this issue and fills this research gap. We intend to have a more in-depth look to understand the role that cryptocurrencies play in loyalty programs as there is limited research on these two topics together, even though cryptos and loyalty programs have a combined monetary value of billions of dollars. The purpose of this thesis is to get a better understanding of the ways in which cryptocurrency, as a forward-thinking component of a reward program's innovative design, might affect consumer loyalty. The study focuses on three primary questions. The first is related to the impact that cryptocurrencies have on people's conceptions of loyalty in the context of loyalty reward programs. The second one focuses on the role of emotions and cognitions of the types of rewards and how the customer molds their loyalty to a particular reward program. The third question centers on the potential implications and impacts that come along with implementing cryptocurrency as a design element in a reward program.To address our research questions, a mix-method study and analysis were conducted. First, we conducted quantitative research on why people (users of loyalty programs) are interested in reward programs and examined how their cognitions and emotions associated with cryptocurrencies influence attitudinal and behavioral loyalty. To accomplish this, we administered a survey to 162 respondents, analyzing various variables, including perceived value, status dependence, and skepticism in the perception of loyalty. Second, we also conducted 7 semi-structured interviews with people who have worked in the loyalty reward industry (employees of firms offering a reward program), which was helpful for taking into consideration the company’s point of view too regarding the role of cryptocurrencies in influencing customer loyalty (adding to the insights derived from the quantitative part of the study regarding the user point of view).Our study contributes to the body of literature on loyalty programs (Kim et al., 2021), which are now being deployed and examined at a pace that is unprecedented, since loyalty programs are excellent tools for relationship marketing. However, attempts in the real world often fail, or at the very least do not live up to expectations, which highlights the need for a closer look at the design of loyalty programs that can boost their effectiveness. We build on prior research that suggests paying attention to the design, psychological, and operational elements which can play a role in influencing customer loyalty and particularly, we focus on cryptocurrencies as a design element that can trigger different emotions and cognitions, which are critical for attitudinal and behavioral loyalty.

No description available.

Modelling dialogue management as a reinforcement learning task enables a system to learn to act optimally by maximising a reward function. This reward function is designed to induce the system behaviour required for goal-oriented applications, which usually means fulfilling the user’s goal as efficiently as possible. However, in real-world spoken dialogue systems, the reward is hard to measure, because the goal of the conversation is often known only to the user. Certainly, the system can ask the user if the goal has been satisfied, but this can be intrusive. Furthermore, in practice, the reliability of the user’s response has been found to be highly variable. In addition, due to the sparsity of the reward signal and the large search space, reinforcement learning-based dialogue policy optimisation is often slow. This thesis presents several approaches to address these problems. To better evaluate a dialogue for policy optimisation, two methods are proposed. First, a recurrent neural network-based predictor pre-trained from off-line data is proposed to estimate task success during subsequent on-line dialogue policy learning to avoid noisy user ratings and problems related to not knowing the user’s goal. Second, an on-line learning framework is described where a dialogue policy is jointly trained alongside a reward function modelled as a Gaussian process with active learning. This mitigates the noisiness of user ratings and minimises user intrusion. It is shown that both off-line and on-line methods achieve practical policy learning in real-world applications, while the latter provides a more general joint learning system directly from users. To enhance the policy learning speed, the use of reward shaping is explored and shown to be effective and complementary to the core policy learning algorithm. Furthermore, as deep reinforcement learning methods have the potential to scale to very large tasks, this thesis also investigates the application to dialogue systems. Two sample-efficient algorithms, trust region actor-critic with experience replay (TRACER) and episodic natural actor-critic with experience replay (eNACER), are introduced. In addition, a corpus of demonstration data is utilised to pre-train the models prior to on-line reinforcement learning to handle the cold start problem. Combining these two methods, a practical approach is demonstrated to effectively learn deep reinforcement learning-based dialogue policies in a task-oriented information seeking domain. Overall, this thesis provides solutions which allow truly on-line and continuous policy learning in spoken dialogue systems.

Syfte: Syftet med denna studie är att skapa en förståelse för hur processen ser ut då organisationer rekonstruerar sina belöningssystem. Metod: Studien har utgått från en kvalitativ metod med en abduktiv ansats. Studien är baserad på fyra semistrukturerade intervjuer med franchisetagare för mäklarorganisationer i Gävle. Resultat & Slutsats: Med en utgångspunkt i det empiriska materialet och teorin som grund har en modell utformats för att besvara hur samspelet mellan ledning och medarbetare påverkar rekonstruktionen av mäklarorganisationers belöningssystem. Denna modell kan redogöra för hur ledningen gör avvägningar mellan organisationens mål och medarbetarnas åsikter för att nå målkongruens. Examensarbetets bidrag: Studien har bidragit med en förståelse för hur processen går till hos mäklarorganisationer gällande rekonstruktion av deras belöningssystem. Studien visar samspelet som finns mellan ledning och medarbetare och hur denna detta spelar en stor roll för rekonstruktionen. Studien skapar en förståelse för Principal-agentteorin och Kontingensteorins roll inom organisationer vid rekonstruktion av belöningssystem. Förslag till fortsatt forskning: På grund av att studien endast studerar en specifik bransch kan det med säkerhet inte svara på om resultatet hade varit detsamma om det applicerats inom en annan bransch. Förslag till vidare forskning är således att testa vår modell för att undersöka hur samspelet mellan ledning och medarbetare påverkar rekonstruktionen av organisationers belöningssystem inom andra branscher. / Aim: The aim with this study is to examine how the process looks like when organizations reconstruct their reward systems. Method: The study applies a qualitative research method with an abductive approach. The study is based on four semi-structured interviews with franchisees for real estate organizations in Gävle. Result & conclusions: Based on the empirical material and the theoretical background a model has been reconstructed to answer how the interplay between governance and coworkers affect the reconstruct of real estate organizations reward systems. With this model we can see how the governance makes trade-offs between the goals of the organizations and the coworkers’ opinions to achieve goal congruence. Contribution of the thesis: The study has contributed with an understanding for how the process works in real estate organizations regarding their reward system. The study shows the interplay between management and employees and how this dynamic plays a major role in the reconstruction. The study provides an understanding of the Principal Agent theory and Contingency Theory’s role within organizations when they reconstruct their reward systems. Suggestions for future research: Due to the fact that this study only examines one industry we cannot with certainty know if the results would be the same if applied in another environment. A suggestion for further research is thus to test our model to examine how the interplay between governance and coworkers affect the reconstruction of an organization's reward system within another industry.

This study originated in the phenomenon that has been observed in the South African Saddle Horse Industry of substantial investments being made over time in the absence of obvious financial or economic reward. A literature study confirmed that, internationally, investment without obvious financial and economic rewards is not unknown and at the same time it was obvious that it is a rarely studied subject. From the literature study it was also evident that this phenomenon occurs where passion and, to a lesser extent, commitment is involved. Economic models on decision making is lacking in perspective on the influence of emotions which were proven to be substantial in an emotionally-laden market, such as the South African Saddle Horse industry. Consumption theory in marketing describes consumption decisions where the consumer is so influenced by emotions that rational influences barely come into play. It is in this context that the study seeks to qualify the investment decisions in the South African Saddle Horse industry by the adaption of consumption theory to investment theory. Research on the indicated strategic phenomenon fits within the critical realism paradigm and is essentially inductive, theory building research. In this case, the adaption of consumer theory as investment theory. Qualifying the influence of emotions in the investment decision – the “why” and “how” questions about a contemporary set of events, over which the researcher has no control – indicates case study as the applicable method of research. In this research, the case study theory is built by generalising case data to prior theory seeking replication or theoretical replication. With prior theory embracing the mentioned consumer theory and case selection dictated by the information, a case study can assist to identify the motivators of the investment decision. Once qualified, the influence of emotions on the investment decision in the mentioned strategic phenomenon can be quantified. Quantifying the influence of emotions on the investment decision leaves two alternatives, the first of which is developing a data set in a statistical survey. However, neuroeconomic findings indicate that opportunity cost comparisons for decisions are supported by our emotional circuitry that is commonly below our conscious awareness. This finding has the direct implication that opportunity cost questions in retrospect do not yield reliable information. The second alternative would be to use dependable historic investment decision data series, such as auction prices. But in the South African Saddle Horse industry, only African Saddle Horse Futurity (ASF) offers any usable investment decision data series, with the AACup being the mother competition in the USA, offering a compatible data series but much more complete and evolved. Therefore, in quantifying the influence of emotions on investment decisions, ASF data and extended AACup auction data is used in an Ordinary Least Squares regression (OLS) analysis and for further calculations. In the literature study it was evident that emotions will be a major influence in investment decisions in the horse industry. This was confirmed by the multiple case study, proving applicability of consumption theory to the investment decision in the South African Saddle Horse industry. The OLS analysis rendered the magnitude of influence of emotions on the investment decision as both prohibitive and irregular on the theoretical determinants of the investment decisions. In all the research done, emotions were unanimously proven to be the determining influence on the investment decision in the South African Saddle Horse industry. But in a free market system where price equates demand and supply, the confirmed influence of emotions in the establishment of price hampers the effective distribution of scarce production resources. In this, the influence of emotions results in a cost to the industry. By manipulating the data set used in the dissertation, an indication of the historic cost of the influence of emotions in the investment decision at the ASF and AACup competitions became apparent. Also, the influence of emotions can be equally crucial in, for example, exploiting economic growth potential. For example, the Saddle Horse industry is a world-wide multimillion dollar industry, with coincidently proven and strong connections with good growth potential to South Africa’s rural areas. These connections contain sustainable development potential to improve the quality of life for many people living in these rural areas. But in order to successfully exploit this potential, more information on emotions as an economic variable is needed in stimulating the industry. In accordance with the incidence of emotions as an influence in decision making, evident in literature and this research, this argument for more information is extendable to numerous other emotionally influenced markets. Therefore, in order to improve reliability of predictions on economic investment and also economic growth, emotions as an influence have to be accounted for. / MSc (Agric), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015