Employee Motivation in the Professional Services Industry

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study is to understand interest alignment and potentially competitive advantage within management consulting firms, as a consequence of the firm’s ability to incentivize and motivate its employees. In doing this, the authors examined various interest-aligning incentive mechanisms and their linkage to a specific firm’s competitive advantage. The findings of this paper indicate that the use of a mix of interconnected incentive mechanisms are related to the case company’s competitive advantage, as they contribute to interest alignment. The firm adopts various incentive mechanisms which can be linked to the agency theory, as well as aspects of the RBV linked to competitive advantage. This linkage proves interesting for future research of interest alignment in PSFs.