Reward mentality as a lever to enhance corporate culture. How can reward and benefit systems improve employee satisfaction and companies' competitiveness?

Master's Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject Leadership and Human Resources - Employee Motivation, grade: 1,4, University of Salford, language: English, abstract: To extend the knowledge about the topic ‘rewards’ and to add academic value to the already existing topic-related publications, the research aim of this study was to explore the improvability of reward mentalities in the shipping sector. Specifically focusing a shipping company located in Germany, the research question was based on how they could optimise their reward and benefit systems in the future. To get a deeper analysis and also to combine given literature to the topic with the current reality, an interview as a form of qualitative data collection was conducted with 14 full-time employees of different hierarchical management levels in four different departments: Sales, Customer Service, IT and Human Resource; deployed in two German offices. The researcher chose the Non-probability Sampling approach focussing on Purposive Sampling and the results were reviewed with thematic analysis through which five main themes came out as a result: overall satisfaction, extrinsic rewards, intrinsic motivation, innovativeness and areas of improvability. These links significantly helped to combine the findings with the critically discussed literature so that further conclusions were generated. The results showed that the effective strategic use of rewards, especially of extrinsic nature both in a monetary and non-monetary way, have a key role in increasing job satisfaction and enhancing innovative mind-set which can be fuelled into company’s success. Moreover, the findings brought a new perspective on the commonalities and differences of employee’s and management’s view on rewards at work and also delivered new impulses in anticipation on how this and conceivably other companies can improve their reward mentality. In the end, different recommendations were given both for the company and future research.