Group budget‐based bonus scheme and group cooperation: The role of social value orientation, goal alignment, and group identity

In a workgroup setting, we use a quasi‐experiment to examine whether and why proself rather than prosocial employees benefit more from high group identity to foster group cooperation. We validate the goal‐transformation hypothesis that proself rather than prosocial employees benefit more from high group identity. Consistent with the goal‐expectation hypothesis, we show that goal alignment explains why proself rather than prosocial employees benefit more from high group identity. The main implication of our results is that, when group identity is high, proself employees reinforce their strategic behaviour to cooperate with the group to obtain higher individual payoffs through greater goal alignment.