Expectation theory is an incentive theory put forward by frum, a famous psychologist and behavioral scientist in North America, in 1964 Work and Motivation. Frum believes that people are always eager to meet certain needs and try to achieve certain goals. When this goal has not been achieved, it shows an expectation. At this time, the goal, in turn, is an inspiring force for personal motivation, and the size of this inspiring force depends on the product of the target value (valence) and the expected probability (expectation value), which is expressed by the formula: M=∑V×E0, where m stands for inspiring force, which refers to the intensity of mobilizing a person's enthusiasm and stimulating his inner potential; V stands for valence, which is a psychological concept and refers to the value of achieving goals to meet his personal needs. For the same goal, the value of the goal is different because everyone's environment and needs are different; E stands for expectation, which means that people judge whether it is possible to achieve a certain goal according to past experience, that is, the probability of achieving the goal. Later, frum developed this formula and changed it to: M=∑E×I×V0. The newly added variable I stands for instrumentality and refers to the belief that individuals can be rewarded for their good performance. This formula shows that the more a person believes that he can improve his work performance as long as he works hard (E), and get the corresponding reward (I) because of the improvement of his performance, and this reward is very valuable (V), the stronger his motivation will be.

Different from the traditional work motivation theory, frum introduces cognitive variables into expectation theory, which helps us to deeply understand the complex mechanism of motivation, provides an important psychological theoretical basis for employee motivation, and has certain enlightenment and reference significance for the current reform of teachers' performance pay system. Based on expectation theory and expectation formula, we believe that in order to effectively mobilize teachers' enthusiasm for work and motivate them to continuously improve their work, we should pay attention to the following points.

First of all, schools should convince teachers that their efforts can produce results. Managers should set appropriate performance goals for teachers on the basis of two-way communication. From the perspective of expectation theory, teachers will be motivated to the extent that they believe that their personal efforts can lead to successful performance. In other words, only teachers believe that if they work hard, they will have the ability and resources to meet the performance standards and they will be able to work hard to achieve their goals. On the contrary, if the school sets too high a goal for teachers, it may lead teachers to give up on themselves and give up their efforts to achieve the goal. Therefore, the goals set by the school for teachers must be achievable and moderately challenging. At the same time, schools should create conditions and provide support for teachers to achieve their goals through school-based training, teaching seminars, workshops, etc., and help teachers to form a positive sense of self-efficacy and expectations of achieving their goals through efforts to improve their performance, experience a sense of accomplishment and work pleasure.

Secondly, schools should strengthen the connection between performance appraisal and incentive wages, and truly establish a distribution system of more work and more pay. If employees are rewarded for outstanding performance, or some employees are rewarded for poor performance, the performance-based salary system can not effectively stimulate employees' enthusiasm for work. Specific to the practice of performance pay reform for primary and secondary school teachers, if a school does not establish an accurate and effective assessment system to evaluate teachers' performance, performance pay is mainly based on teachers' positions, professional titles, teaching experience and other factors, and has no direct connection with teachers' actual performance, so the original intention of encouraging teachers through performance pay system cannot be realized. However, it is worth noting that teachers' education and teaching work is very complicated and special, which is different from workers' work in factories or sales in commercial fields, and its performance objectives and performance evaluation indicators are usually difficult to operate. In practice, how to combine hard performance evaluation indicators with soft performance targets, how to embody the characteristics of teachers' work, and how to establish a moderate and reasonable relationship between teachers' performance and performance pay need further exploration.

Finally, managers should carefully set the amount of incentive pay to make it attractive enough. According to the explanation of expectation theory, the valence of reward is a very important variable. In other words, whether the reward itself can meet the needs of employees and whether it is important to employees will greatly affect the power of motivation. In the teacher's performance-based salary system being implemented, the reward is presented in the form of salary. According to the documents issued by the three ministries, incentive performance pay accounts for 30% of the total wages, which mainly reflects factors such as workload and actual contribution. However, from the implementation situation, some schools are very cautious in their attitudes and practices because they are worried about the unfairness caused by the widening income gap between teachers. In fact, the share of incentive pay directly affected by work performance or actual contribution is usually less than 30%, generally between 5%- 15%. In this way, the wage gap between teachers with excellent performance and teachers with poor performance is correspondingly narrowed, which reduces the attractiveness and potency of incentive pay to a certain extent and restricts the actual effect of performance pay. Therefore, under the framework of regional guidance, schools should appropriately increase the share of incentive wages, widen the income gap of teachers with different performance levels, and truly establish a distribution system of more work and more pay.

Second, based on the analysis of fairness theory.

The theory of fairness was put forward by J.S. Adams, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, in the 1960s. Its foundation comes from Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory and homans's social exchange theory. Although fairness theory and expectation theory have almost the same history, until recently, fairness theory has attracted more attention and aroused managers' extensive interest in fairness. moon

Equity theory focuses on how employees respond to the content of distribution decision, which is usually called distribution equity. It can predict people's judgment on whether the distribution in the organization is fair, and it can also predict when people will.

How to react when you think you have been treated unfairly. Adams described the employment relationship as an exchange relationship, in which employees make contributions and get corresponding returns. Employees usually care about whether the return is fair. When people perceive whether a result is fair, they will first calculate the ratio between their own return and their own input, and then compare their own ratio with that of others, so as to draw a conclusion whether it is fair or not. When employees find that their income and expenditure ratio is equal to others or that their current income and expenditure ratio is equal to the past, they think it is reasonable and fair, so as to achieve psychological balance and high work enthusiasm; When employees find that their income and expenditure ratio is not equal to that of others, or that their current income and expenditure ratio is not equal to that of the past, they will be psychologically unbalanced and feel unfair.

Equity theory not only deepens the research on employee motivation, but also provides a basic theoretical framework for salary design, which has the following important implications for the current teacher performance pay system.

First of all, managers should attach great importance to teachers' fair feelings. Adams pointed out that the sense of unfairness can make individuals feel nervous, and the sense of tension is directly proportional to the degree of unfairness. When employees find that the return is insufficient and the ratio of income to expenditure is relatively low, the main ways for them to restore fairness are: first, to change their investment by reducing their efforts and shortening their working hours; Second, change the return by asking for a raise, improving the working environment and increasing recognition; Third, misinterpret the input or gain in cognition, make a rational explanation, and reduce personal pressure; Fourth, compare the investment and return of the object from another angle, and take certain measures to change his behavior or force him to leave the organization; Fifth, choose another comparison object to gain a subjective sense of fairness; Sixth, leave. It is not difficult to find that these methods are destructive to the personal development of employees and the improvement of organizational performance. Therefore, when designing the performance-based pay system for primary and secondary schools in compulsory education, teachers' fair feelings must be fully considered, so as to avoid a wider or greater sense of unfairness and prevent the embarrassing situation that teachers' enthusiasm will fall instead of rise after the implementation of performance-based pay. It is particularly important to note that the sense of fairness is a subjective feeling, not an objective environmental feature. In the design and implementation of performance pay, managers should listen to teachers' voices and understand their feelings. Find and adjust the potential problems of teachers' psychological level in time.

Secondly, the performance-based salary system should embody the principle of salary design based on fairness theory. From the logical analysis of fairness theory; The employee's sense of fairness is deeply influenced by the reference he chooses. According to different allegations, distributive justice can be further divided into external justice, internal justice and individual justice. These three kinds of fairness just correspond to the principles of external competitiveness, internal consistency and individual contribution in salary design. Scientific and reasonable design of firewood phenol should give consideration to these three basic principles and solve three fairness problems. Specific to the design of teachers' performance pay, the relevant documents have clearly pointed out that the average level of teachers' subsidies in the standardized compulsory education stage is determined by the people's governments at or above the county level in accordance with the principle of not being lower than the average salary level of local civil servants, and the performance pay level of compulsory education schools is generally balanced in the same county-level administrative region, which provides a strong policy guarantee for ensuring the moderate external competitiveness of teachers' salaries. Relatively speaking, managers should pay more attention to the principles of internal consistency and personal contribution in the design of teachers' performance pay. On the one hand, primary and secondary school managers should define the responsibilities and requirements of different positions such as middle-level cadres, teaching and research leaders, class teachers and classroom teachers based on rigorous and standardized work analysis, evaluate the value of each position, and determine the average salary of each position accordingly, reflecting the principle of internal consistency in salary design. On the other hand, managers should further study the methods of teachers' performance evaluation, objectively and reasonably evaluate teachers' work performance, reasonably determine the distribution mode of incentive pay according to the results of performance evaluation, and establish the connection between personal contribution and incentive pay; Overcome the phenomenon of "doing well is the same as doing badly", so as to effectively motivate teachers to do their jobs well and improve their work performance.

Finally, managers should pay attention to procedural fairness. Some researchers have pointed out that the process of planning and implementing decisions is the decisive factor of perceived fairness, not the number of results obtained afterwards. When the procedure is considered unfair, employees will retaliate against the organization. If employees feel that the procedure is fair, they may not react negatively even if the result is unfair. In this sense, procedural fairness is more important than distributive fairness. Inspired by this, primary and secondary schools should pay attention to procedural democracy and fairness in the process of designing and implementing the performance-based pay system, among which the most crucial ones are the right to inform in advance, the right to appeal and the right to request interpretation. Only when these basic rights are strongly guaranteed and procedural justice is recognized by teachers can performance pay play its positive incentive role.

Thirdly, based on the analysis of cognitive evaluation theory.

Cognitive evaluation theory is a kind of motivation process theory put forward by American psychologists E.L.De-ci and R.M.Ryan in 1980s. It originated from a series of related experiments conducted by Deutsch in the early 1970s. These experimental studies try to answer the question: does the individual's internal motivation weaken or increase, or does it remain unchanged after external rewards? Experiments show that when an individual is dominated by intrinsic motivation to participate in an activity and the result is rewarded by external material, the intrinsic motivation that drives the individual to participate in the activity will be weakened. Based on these findings, Dez and Ryan put forward a cognitive evaluation theory in 1985 to explain how external rewards and related environmental factors affect internal motivation. The theory points out that the influence of external events (such as giving incentives, evaluating, setting deadlines, etc.) on internal motivation is mediated by the individual's cognition of external events, and depends on how these events affect the individual's sense of competence and self-determination. Whether events promote or hinder the sense of competence and self-determination mainly depends on the information and control significance of external events perceived by individuals. The informational meaning of rewards (and other external events) usually promotes the individual's sense of competence and self-determination, thus enhancing the intrinsic motivation; Controlling meaning usually leads to a low sense of autonomy, so it will weaken the internal motivation. Material rewards are usually regarded by individuals as a kind of temptation to let people participate in something or show some behavior, but without these rewards, individuals may not do these things or show such behavior. Therefore, in general, material rewards will be perceived by individuals as control, which will lead to the weakening of internal motivation. However, it should be pointed out that the results of using material rewards are not negative in all cases. In an appropriate interpersonal situation, if we use the performation-contiguous reward, that is, whether an individual can get a reward or not is determined according to whether his performance in the activity reaches a certain excellent standard or exceeds a certain established standard, then the individual may also perceive the reward as informational meaning, thus playing an incentive role.

Although the theory of cognitive evaluation was criticized later, it is of great practical significance to performance pay and employee motivation. Connecting the cognitive evaluation theory with salary design, we find that the performance-based salary system for teachers, like other external reward methods, is a "double-edged sword", and its function may be positive or negative. In order to give full play to the incentive function of the performance pay system, the author has two suggestions.

First of all, managers should realize the limitations of material rewards and overcome the superstition of performance pay. Salary and incentive salary are the most common ways to motivate employees in the field of human resource management. If used properly, they can not only motivate employees to continuously improve their job performance, improve job satisfaction and organizational commitment, but also have a positive impact on the performance of teams and organizations. However, material incentives have certain limitations, which may sometimes destroy the internal motivation of individuals. Therefore, we can't simply think that the performance pay system will inevitably motivate teachers. In primary and secondary schools, if managers place too much emphasis on performance pay, they often use the phrase "We will reward those who do well". In this case, we will deduct the reward pay for those who do not do well. Using performance pay as a means to control teachers' behavior may weaken teachers' internal motivation. It turns out that teachers are engaged in education with love and responsibility, but in the context of performance pay, they have become working for money. This will reduce the overall morale of teachers, affect teachers' professional ethics, and then affect the educational performance of the whole school. Managers should be active but not superstitious when implementing the performance pay system.

Second, managers should create positive interpersonal situations and build a people-oriented organizational culture. According to the theory of cognitive evaluation, whether external rewards constitute incentives for individuals depends on how individuals understand reward events. However, whether the individual's perception of reward events is controlling or informative is greatly influenced by interpersonal situational factors. If the interpersonal situation is controlling, that is to say, users use reward as a means to control individuals and make individuals "obedient" and "obedient to leaders". The effect of reward is usually negative; If interpersonal situation is informative, that is, reward can convey information about individual behavior or ability level, and can improve individual's sense of competence and self-determination, then reward can stimulate individual's intrinsic motivation. This enlightens us that managers should consciously create positive and supportive interpersonal situations in the process of implementing the reform of teachers' performance pay. More specifically, it is suggested that primary and secondary schools should combine material incentives with non-material incentives to reduce teachers' workload, improve the relationship between teachers and schools, strengthen teachers' participation and organizational identity, and stimulate teachers' work enthusiasm through diversified non-material commendation methods, self-help welfare plans or job redesign. Only managers can understand and respect teachers' diverse needs, recognize teachers' efforts and contributions, let teachers experience a sense of accomplishment and happiness, form an interpersonal atmosphere of mutual respect and support between cadres and teachers, and build a people-oriented organizational culture can performance pay give full play to its incentive role.

The performance pay system implemented in primary and secondary schools in compulsory education stage is an important measure to implement the compulsory education law and improve the status of teachers, and it is also an important means to motivate teachers. However, performance pay is not necessarily an effective incentive for teachers. Only under the premise of law can primary and secondary schools design and implement the performance pay system according to the relevant theories of psychology and achieve the expected results. Of course, it should be pointed out that each psychological theory analyzes the process and strategy of motivation from different angles, which has its positive significance and certain limitations. Sometimes, there are conflicts and mutual constraints between different psychological explanations. Therefore, in the practice of performance-based pay reform, managers should combine the actual situation of the school and integrate the viewpoints of various psychological theories to form a practical and effective implementation plan.