For organizations seeking to improve employee well-being, offering time-based rewards — such as paid vacation — could play a powerful role.
Receiving paid vacation time significantly increased workers’ feelings of humanness compared to receiving equivalent monetary bonuses, according to a research article published Aug. 22 in the Journal of Managerial Psychology.
The authors, Alice Lee-Yoon, PhD, of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Sanford DeVoe, of the University of California Los Angeles, wrote that while rewards are generally intended to motivate and recognize performance, vacation rewards uniquely allow employees to psychologically separate their personal lives from work demands.
Cash bonuses, by contrast, do not clearly create the same boundary between work and non-work life, the authors wrote, because money remains closely associated with work-related, calculative thinking.
The findings are based on three preregistered experiments involving 2,206 total participants. In one study, 1,498 participants were asked to recall a time they received a monetary bonus or paid vacation and report how it made them feel. Participants rated their experience on a scale ranging from feeling more like a “robot” to feeling more “human,” with vacation rewards consistently associated with higher feelings of humanness.
Across the studies, the researchers found that work-life segmentation — the degree to which individuals feel able to separate work from personal life — explained why vacation rewards had a stronger effect on felt humanness. In one experiment, imagining greater separation from work during time off directly increased participants’ feelings of being fully human.
The study did not examine whether employees prefer paid time off over cash bonuses, but instead focuses on how different types of rewards influence employees’ psychological experiences at work.
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