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Conventional wisdom suggests that an increase in monetary incentives should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009230143
Do employees work harder if their job has the right mission? In a laboratory labor market experiment, we test whether subjects provide higher effort if they can choose the mission of their job. We observe that subjects do not provide higher effort than in a control treatment. Surprised by this...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009534884
Rank-order relative-performance evaluation, in which pay, promotion and symbolic awards depend on the rank of workers in the distribution of performance, is ubiquitous. Whenever firms use rank-order relative-performance evaluation, workers receive feedback about their rank. Using a real-effort...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011308986
We introduce the "ball-catching task", a novel computerized real effort task, which combines “real” efforts with induced material cost of effort. The central feature of the ball-catching task is that it allows researchers to manipulate the cost of effort function as well as the production...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010528809
The "ratchet effect" refers to a phenomenon where workers whose compensation is based on productivity strategically restrict their output, relative to their capability, because they rationally anticipate that high levels of output will be met with increased or "ratcheted-up" expectations in the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011484559
We study how upward communication - from workers to managers - about individual efforts affects the effectiveness of gift exchange as a contract-enforcement device for work teams. Our findings suggest that the use of such self-assessments can be detrimental to workers' performance. In the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010467800
While intuition suggests that empowering workers to have some say in the control of the firm is likely to have beneficial incentive effects, empirical evidence of such an effect is hard to come by because of numerous confounding factors in the naturally occurring data. We report evidence from a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009126031
We conduct a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain of 122 stores to study the interaction between team incentives, team social cohesion, and team performance. Theory predicts that the effect of team incentives on team performance increases with the team's social cohesion, because social...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012253632
The performance of a work team commonly depends on the effort exerted by the team members as well as on the division of tasks among them. However, when leaders assign tasks to team members, performance is usually not the only consideration. Favouritism, employees' seniority, employees'...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011776037
We study how help can be fostered by means of a team bonus in the presence of rank-order tournaments. In a simple model we combine elements of relative rewards and a team bonus and study their effect on effort, help and sabotage. Quite intuitively the theoretical analysis suggests that team...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011997551