Monetary rewards and hierarchy level as drivers of employees’ self-evaluations

We explore the relation between job characteristics and employees’ self-evaluations of performance in comparison to their colleagues’ performance. Using unique individual panel data from ten large firms in Germany’s chemical industry, we focus on monetary rewards (wage increases and bonus payments) and the level of the hierarchy as well as interactions with gender and tenure as possible drivers of self-evaluations. Our results hint for a positive relation of both monetary rewards and hierarchy level with self-evaluations. We find less evidence for our hypotheses regarding interaction effects of gender and tenure.