Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: The effectiveness of monetary rewards in motivating community health volunteers (CHVs), who are assumed to have strong prosocial motivation, is widely debated. Village offices are responsible for managing their activity and should sustain CHVs’ work motivation; however, empirical evidence on the types of rewards that are effective for enhancing their motivation remains limited.
METHODS: To elicit reward preferences, a discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted in the suburbs of Yogyakarta, the second-largest city in Indonesia, among 691 CHVs. To capture the levels of altruism, a hypothetical dictator game (HDG) was employed. To explore the reward preferences of CHVs, multinomial linear regression models are estimated. Moreover, by combining the responses of the DCE and the levels of altruism measured by the HDG, the threshold regression is applied to examine the heterogeneity across CHVs with different levels of altruism.
RESULTS: The results show that the CHVs are willing to accept both monetary and non-monetary rewards. Specifically, CHVs prefer rewards with higher salaries and activity certificates reflecting social recognition. These estimates suggest that a certificate from the village office is the most preferred (70,695 IDR), followed by one issued from the primary health center (57,545 IDR) and the university (56,022 IDR). The threshold regression further reveals that more altruistic CHVs place higher value on the certificates, except for the one issued by the village office. The village-issued certificate appears to have additional value for less altruistic CHVs.
CONCLUSIONS: Rapid economic growth and urbanization have reshaped CHVs' preferences, blending traditional values such as mutual help and modern social values such as materialism. Given this coexisting blended value system, policymakers should combine monetary and non-monetary rewards considerately and tailor the balance to maximize its effectiveness.