Digital Incentive: Concept, Process and Reflections

Sun Xinbo; He Zhiwei; Zhang Qingqiang; Qin Jiahui; Sun Haobo

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20220803.301

Summary

Digital incentive, which is born in the digital era, has a great impact on traditional incentive mechanisms and approaches, and provides an opportunity to solve the dilemma of traditional incentives. Digital incentive refers to the process of building a digital platform ecosystem based on digital technologies, collecting the behavior and characteristic data of the stimulated object in real time, and automatically carrying out subsequent data processing and analysis to fully release the incentive value contained in the data, so as to accurately strengthen or weaken the specific behavior of the stimulated object. Scholars have begun to explore the role of digital technologies in organizational incentive from different perspectives, and based on this, the related concepts of digital incentive are proposed. However, there is no consensus on the definition of digital incentive, and the connotation, boundary and core dimensions of digital incentive have not yet reached an agreement. In addition, the general process of digital incentive is still unclear, so it is difficult to provide systematic guidance for the application and popularization of digital incentive.

Given this, this paper examines the following aspects of digital incentive: First, it summarizes the changes of incentive in the digital era, defines the application boundary of digital incentive, and answers “what is digital incentive”. Second, it focuses on the practice of digital incentive, summarizes its general implementation process, and answers “how to do it”. Third, based on the principles of humanism, efficiency and system, it explores and rethinks the practice of digital incentive, reveals the positive significance and potential consequences of digital incentive, and discusses its potential breakthrough and enlightenment to the theory and practice of established organizational human resource management.

First, using the Cite Space software, this paper identifies the core dimensions of “digital incentive” related research through cluster analysis: era background, technical basis, incentive mechanism, key activities, and application scenarios, and further puts forward the concept of digital incentive based on the understanding of the relationship among core dimensions. Second, this paper analyzes different application scenarios of digital incentive, combines the concept and core dimensions of digital incentive, and summarizes the general process of implementing digital incentive. Third, starting from the principles of humanism, efficiency and system that organizational human resource management follows, this paper inquires and reflects the practice of digital incentives, and points out the breakthrough direction of organizational human resource management theory accordingly, so as to correctly guide and vigorously promote the development of digital incentive to a deeper level.

The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, the concept, structure and application boundary of digital incentive are clarified, and similar concepts such as incentive digitalization, digitalization incentive and digital incentive are distinguished and analyzed, which lays a foundation for the further study of digital incentive. Second, the implementation process of digital incentive is combed from two dimensions of technology and organization, which provides theoretical guidance for the application and popularization of digital incentive. Third, starting from the humanism principle, efficiency principle and system principle concerned by the human resource management theory, it breaks through the object, method and scope of organizational human resource management in existing theories, and points out the direction for the further development of organizational human resource management theory.