Managers' Freelancer Mindset Orientation and relational evaluations as drivers of pay decisions for external workers

Organizations increasingly rely on freelancers, yet pay parity between freelancers and comparable employees varies widely. This study introduces Freelancer Mindset Orientation (FMO), managers' perception of freelancing as a legitimate, attractive, and personally resonant career mode, and examines how it shapes pay equality decisions for external workers through relational evaluations and organizational inclusion practices.

Survey data from 353 managers recruited via the Prolific platform were analyzed using path analysis in Mplus 9, with bias-corrected bootstrapped confidence intervals (5,000 resamples) to test mediation and moderation hypotheses.

Managers' Freelancer Mindset Orientation (FMO) was positively associated with pay equality for freelancers and with more favorable relational evaluations of freelancers (perceived fit, commitment/loyalty, and trustworthiness). Relational evaluations were, in turn, positively associated with pay equality and partially explained by the FMO-pay association. The positive association between FMO and pay equality was stronger among managers reporting higher organizational inclusion of freelancers. Inclusion also strengthened the association between FMO and relational evaluations, whereas the association between relational evaluations and pay equality did not vary significantly across inclusion levels.

The cross-sectional design limits causal inference. Future research should employ longitudinal designs, multi-source data (payroll records, freelancer reports), and cross-national samples.

Organizations can promote pay fairness by developing managerial FMO through training, building trust-based manager-freelancer relationships, and implementing inclusive practices that integrate freelancers into organizational workflows.

This study introduces FMO as a novel identity-based micro-level construct and provides the first empirical test of how managerial career orientations, relational evaluations, and inclusion practices jointly determine pay equality for external workers.