Motivational Seminar
When the whole is more than the sum of its parts: Motivation gains in the wild
Joachim Hüffmeier & Guido Hertel
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Whereas negative effects of groups on individual motivation have been reported for many years, recent research has begun to show when and why working in a group can produce motivation gains compared to individual work. So far, this evidence has been limited to laboratory settings and rather simple tasks. Using data from swimming competitions at the 2008 Olympics, evidence is presented that motivation gains in groups also occur in field settings with more complex tasks. Based on an instrumentality x value approach, we expect that late positions in a relay trigger motivation gains in groups due to an increase in perceived indispensability for the group outcome. This idea has been initially tested in a pilot study with competitive swimmers, demonstrating that perceived indispensability for the relay outcome indeed increases with later serial positions in a relay. Moreover, the main study with data from the 2008 Olympics revealed performance times consistent with this pattern of indispensability perceptions: While starting swimmers in the swimming relays performed at similar levels as in their individual competitions, swimmers at the later positions showed higher performance in the relay compared to their individual competition heats.
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Round Numbers as Goals: Evidence From Baseball, SAT Takers, and the Lab
Devin Pope & Uri Simonsohn
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Where do people's reference points come from? We conjectured that round numbers in performance scales act as reference points and that individuals exert effort to perform just above rather than just below such numbers. In Study 1, we found that professional baseball players modify their behavior as the season is about to end, seeking to finish with a batting average just above rather than below .300. In Study 2, we found that high school students are more likely to retake the SAT after obtaining a score just below rather than above a round number. In Study 3, we conducted an experiment employing hypothetical scenarios and found that participants reported a greater desire to exert more effort when their performance was just short of rather than just above a round number.
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Mixing the princes and the paupers: Pay and performance in the National Basketball Association
Rob Simmons & David Berri
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate how team and individual performances of players in the National Basketball Association respond to variations in intra-team pay inequality. By breaking down team dispersion into conditional and expected components, we find that expected pay dispersion has a positive effect on team and individual performance. We find that team and individual performances are essentially orthogonal to conditional pay inequality, counter to the hypotheses of fairness and cohesion proposed in the literature both for sports and general occupations. A change in collective bargaining regime in 1996 had little impact on either team or player productivity.
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Analyzing Compensation Methods in Manufacturing: Piece Rates, Time Rates, or Gain-Sharing?
Susan Helper, Morris Kleiner & Yingchun Wang
NBER Working Paper, November 2010
Abstract:
Economists have often argued that "pay for performance" is the optimal compensation scheme. However, use of the simplest form of pay for performance, the piece rate, has been in decline in manufacturing in recent decades. We show both theoretically and empirically that these changes are due to adoption of "modern manufacturing" in which firms produce a greater variety of products to a more demanding quality and delivery standard. We further develop a theory of the type of compensation system appropriate for this kind of production, in which there is a high return to "multi-tasking", where the same workers perform both easy-to-observe and hard-to-observe tasks and to "just-in-time" production, which entails a high cost of holding inventory. We test these predictions using detailed monthly information on firm outcomes and employee surveys from four plants in two companies that adopted modern manufacturing methods and changed their method of compensation from piece rates to either time rates or value-added gain-sharing. We find that time rates and gain-sharing are associated with reduced employee performance on easy-to-observe tasks, enhanced performance on hard-to-observe tasks, and improved firm profitability. Our analysis shows the importance of distinguishing types of incentive pay: we find that modern manufacturing is consistent with either group incentive pay (such as gain-sharing), or no incentives (such as hourly pay), but inconsistent with individual incentive pay (piece rates).
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What Makes Them Tick? Employee Motives and Firm Innovation
Henry Sauermann & Wesley Cohen
Management Science, December 2010, Pages 2134-2153
Abstract:
Economists studying innovation and technological change have made significant progress toward understanding firms' profit incentives as drivers of innovation. However, innovative performance in firms should also depend heavily on the pecuniary and nonpecuniary motives of the employees actually working in research and development. Using data on more than 1,700 Ph.D. scientists and engineers, we examine the relationships between individuals' motives (e.g., desire for intellectual challenge, income, or responsibility) and their innovative performance. We find that motives matter, but different motives have very different effects: Motives regarding intellectual challenge, independence, and money have a strong positive relationship with innovative output, whereas motives regarding job security and responsibility tend to have a negative relationship. We also explore possible mechanisms underlying the observed relationships between motives and performance. Although hours worked (quantity of effort) have a strong positive effect on performance, motives appear to affect innovative performance primarily via other dimensions of effort (character of effort). Finally, we find some evidence that the role of motives differs in upstream research versus downstream development.
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Do salaries improve worker performance?
Alex Bryson, Babatunde Buraimo & Rob Simmons
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We establish the effects of salaries on worker performance by exploiting a natural experiment in which some workers in a particular occupation (football referees) switch from short-term contracts to salaried contracts. Worker performance improves among those who move onto salaried contracts relative to those who do not. The finding is robust to the introduction of worker fixed effects indicating that it is not driven by better workers being awarded salary contracts. Nor is it sensitive to workers sorting into or out of the profession. Improved performance could arise from the additional effort workers exert due to career concerns, the higher income associated with career contracts (an efficiency wage effect) or improvements in worker quality arising from off-the-job training which accompanies the salaried contracts.
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Pablo Arocena, Mikel Villanueva, Raquel Arévalo & Xosé Vázquez
Industrial and Corporate Change, forthcoming
Abstract:
Economic theory regarding moral hazard at work is somewhat at odds with recent business evidence. Whereas firms in economically and technologically stable environments could apparently follow conventional wisdom when trying to reduce moral hazard through tight supervision and incentive packages, the increasingly innovative and competitive environment is pushing firms to follow human resource practices that explicitly and consciously make managers more vulnerable to opportunistic conducts. We explain this paradox through a generalization of Akerlof and Yellen's fair-wage-effort hypothesis. We argue there is a tradeoff between the effort that firms can capture from their workers (controllable effort) and the level of discretionary effort that employees can offer, upon which the particular excellence and innovative performance of the firm relies. We test our proposition on a wide dataset composed of 2882 workers. After controlling for several firm and industry traits, evidence confirms the potential role of moral hazard as an opportunity for excellence at work.
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Entry into winner-take-all and proportional-prize contests: An experimental study
Timothy Cason, William Masters & Roman Sheremeta
Journal of Public Economics, October 2010, Pages 604-611
Abstract:
This experiment compares the performance of two contest designs: a standard winner-take-all tournament with a single fixed prize, and a novel proportional-payment design in which that same prize is divided among contestants by their share of total achievement. We find that proportional prizes elicit more entry and more total achievement than the winner-take-all tournament. The proportional-prize contest performs better by limiting the degree to which heterogeneity among contestants discourages weaker entrants, without altering the performance of stronger entrants. These findings could inform the design of contests for technological and other improvements, which are widely used by governments and philanthropic donors to elicit more effort on targeted economic and technological development activities.
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Kerry Papps, Alex Bryson & Rafael Gomez
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
A detailed longitudinal dataset is assembled containing annual performance and biographical data for every player over the entire history of professional major league baseball. The data are then aggregated to the team level for the period 1920-2009 in order to test whether teams built on a more even distribution of observed talent perform better than those teams with a mixture of highly able and less able players. The dependent variable used in the regressions is the percentage of games a team wins each season. We find that conditioning on average player ability, dispersion of both batting and pitching talent displays an optimal degree of inequality, in that teams with too high or too low a spread in player ability perform worse than teams with a more balanced distribution of offensive and defensive talent. These findings have potentially important applications both inside and outside of the sporting world.
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Managing others like you were managed: How prevention focus motivates copying interpersonal norms
Shu Zhang, Tory Higgins & Guoquan Chen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 5 studies, we investigated the relation between regulatory focus and the tendency to copy a role model's managing behavior after one experiences this behavior as its recipient and later takes on the same managing role. Because enacting role-related behaviors fulfills interpersonal norms that fit prevention concerns, we predicted a stronger tendency to copy among individuals with a stronger prevention focus on duties and obligations ("oughts") but not among those with a stronger promotion focus on aspirations and advancements (ideals). We also predicted that individuals with a stronger prevention focus would tend to copy a managing behavior regardless of their earlier hedonic experience with this behavior as its recipient. These predictions were first supported in 2 experimental studies, where a stronger prevention focus was measured as a chronic disposition (Study 1) and experimentally induced as a temporary state (Study 2). Further, we tested the mechanism underlying the relation between stronger prevention and stronger copying and found that concerns about the normativeness, but not the effectiveness, of a managing behavior motivated copying for individuals with a strong prevention focus (Studies 3 and 4). We generalized these experimental results to the field by surveying a sample of superior-subordinate dyads in real world organizations (Study 5). Across all studies, we found that individuals with a stronger prevention focus tend to copy more a role model's managing behavior - independent of their hedonic satisfaction with the behavior as its recipient and their perception of its effectiveness.
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Russell Johnson, Chu-Hsiang Chang & Christopher Rosen
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, December 2010, Pages 3020-3058
Abstract:
Across 2 experiments, we examined motivational processes elicited by justice-related experiences. Specifically, we examined the effects of justice on recipients' self-identity and regulatory focus. As predicted, those who experienced unfairness had a strong individual identity and prevention focus owing to the threats of social rejection and economic exploitation communicated by unfairness. Conversely, individuals exposed to fairness had strong interdependent identities and promotion focus owing to the favorable economic and socioemotional information communicated by fairness. These effects were accentuated among participants who reported high sensitivity to injustice and internal loci of control. Our findings are important because they highlight causal associations between justice and key motivation constructs.
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Executive turnover: The influence of dispersion and other pay system characteristics
Jake Messersmith et al.
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using tournament theory as a guiding theoretical framework, in this study, we assess the organizational implications of pay dispersion and other pay system characteristics on the likelihood of turnover among individual executives in organizational teams. Specifically, we estimate the effect of these pay system characteristics on executive turnover decisions. We use a multi-industry, multilevel data set composed of executives in publicly held firms to assess the effects of pay dispersion at the individual level. Consistent with previous findings, we find that pay dispersion is associated with an increased likelihood of executive turnover. In addition, we find that other pay characteristics also affect turnover, both directly and through a moderating effect on pay dispersion. Turnover is more likely when executives receive lower portions of overall top management team compensation and when they have more pay at risk. These conditions also moderate the relationship between pay dispersion and individual turnover decisions, as does receiving lower compensation relative to the market.
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Martin Tomasik, Rainer Silbereisen & Jutta Heckhausen
Motivation and Emotion, December 2010, Pages 384-398
Abstract:
This paper investigates how individuals deal with demands of social and economic change in the domains of work and family when opportunities for their mastery are unfavorable. Theoretical considerations and empirical research suggest that with unattainable goals and unmanageable demands motivational disengagement and self-protective cognitions bring about superior outcomes than continued goal striving. Building on research on developmental deadlines, this paper introduces the concept of developmental barriers to address socioeconomic conditions of severely constrained opportunities in certain geographical regions. Mixed-effects methods were used to model cross-level interactions between individual-level compensatory secondary control and regional-level opportunity structures in terms of social indicators for the economic prosperity and family friendliness. Results showed that disengagement was positively associated with general life satisfaction in regions that were economically devastated and has less than average services for families. In regions that were economically well off and family-friendly, the association was negative. Similar results were found for self-protection concerning domain-specific satisfaction with life. These findings suggest that compensatory secondary control can be an adaptive way of mastering a demand when primary control is not possible.
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Dirk Van Dierendonck & Gabriele Jacobs
British Journal of Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is a lack of consistent evidence that downsizing leads to improved financial performance. Lowered commitment after painful downsizing periods is identified as an important reason why downsizing does not show the intended long-term effects. This paper provides a meta-analytical overview of the impact of fairness on organizational commitment for survivors and victims after a downsizing operation. Among 37 samples (11,256 persons), a positive relationship was found between fairness and affective organizational commitment (ρ=0.40) for both survivors and victims. Three moderators of the fairness-commitment relationship were identified: (1) for survivors, procedural justice matters more than distributive justice; (2) the impact of fairness is stronger in countries with an individualistic (versus collectivistic) culture; (3) fairness matters more when mass layoff is initiated for profit maximization (versus economic necessity).