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The worst time to surprise your team with a bonus is halfway through the job

Spot bonuses are supposed to keep people working hard. Hand one out halfway through a job, and workers may decide they've done enough

Narisara Nami / Getty Images

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Managers like to hand out spot bonuses in the middle of a hard stretch. When a team is halfway through a product launch or a quarter-end close and people are staying late, managers see bonuses as a kind of thank-you. And the hope is that people who feel appreciated will pay some of that goodwill back in effort. Economists have long assumed that workers behave this way.

A team of economists led by the University of Passau's Gianluca Grimalda tested that assumption in Bogotá in 2014, hiring people for what they believed was a one-day data-entry job. They spent the morning in separate rooms, typing street addresses from phone books into a spreadsheet. At lunch, the supervisor told some pairs they were getting a bonus worth a third of the day's wages. Those workers spent the rest of the afternoon working as fast as they did in the morning. The remaining pairs actually got faster as the day went on.

When the team repeated........

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