Abstract: The key to advancing collaborative innovation within a team lies in addressing the issue of team motivation. Traditional team incentives, achieved through mechanisms of shared benefits, are designed to foster teamwork. However, poor performers within the team not only hinder the team's progress but also impact the rewards of other team members. To mitigate the negative effect of “tandem pun-ishment for performance”, it becomes particularly crucial to explore the self-correction mechanisms in team incentives. This paper com-prehensively applies the three points of attribution theory (locus of control, controllability and stability), the three conditions of guilt production (drag down others, internal attribution and high controllability), three premises of performance improvement (expectancy, instrumentality and valence) and three aspects of motivational strategy (emotion, cognition and behavior) to construct a two-stage media-tion model with three interactions, aiming to reveal the benign mechanism of “tandem punishment against mediocrity”. Under this back-ground, the interval estimation Bootstrap method and Johnson-Neyman method are used to conduct a hypothesis testing based on 116 teams in 24 enterprises. The results show that if an employee performs poorly due to internal controllable factors under the conditions of performance pay, he or she will feel guilty and become motivated to perform well. Furthermore, if spurred by colleagues on the basis of the attribution, the poor performer who feels guilty will have a stronger motivation to perform well. This study offers fresh insights into the traditional Chinese military wisdom of the “tandem punishment for performance” system from a self-driven perspective. Simultaneously, it also offers theoretical and practical implications for contemporary organizations on how to break the “team incentive dilemma”.

Key words: poor performer, team pay-for-performance, guilt, spur, performance improvement motivation