A fundamental challenge to organizations is ensuring that members act to achieve organizational objectives. This challenge arises from the inevitable circumstance wherein an individual's self-interests are not consonant with the goals and objectives of the organization. Broadly speaking, organizations address this challenge through organizational control, which is defined as a process that directs, motivates, and encourages employee behaviors that are congruent with organizational objectives (Ouchi,1977, 1979; Snell, 1992). Organizational controls vary along numerous dimensions, such as formality, target, and scope (Cardinal, Sitkin, and Long, Chapter 3). In this chapter, we focus on one distinction among control practices, the motivational mechanisms that underlie the operation of controls. Often, organizational control takes the form of mechanisms or systems that appeal to an individual's self-interests. These mechanisms involve linking incentives or other personal consequences to actions that further the organization's objectives. Alternatively, organizations may seek to guide employee behavior through indirect social influence processes. Such mechanisms affect behavior via social structures and processes such as organizational culture, normative influence, and identification. Control exercised through indirect social influence directs members' attention toward the cooperative accomplishment of organizational goals. In short, organizations exert control through two distinctly different motivational mechanisms; that is, by appealing to employees' rational self-interest or through indirect social influence processes that de-emphasize the self.

Understanding the distinction in these motivational mechanisms is important, for research and theory suggest that there is substantial variation in the degree to which individuals are motivated by self-interest and are disposed to engage in rational reasoning (Cropanzano et al., 2005; Ferraro et al., 2005).