Search results

Frontline workers (FLWs) constitute a critical part of the implementation cadre within public policies, serving a significant role in the last-mile delivery of public goods and services. FLWs under public programs in low and middle-income countries like India are offered different compensation structures that range from full-time salaries, piece rate honorariums, contractual engagements, to no remuneration. Whilst the rationale for offering different compensations vary, are certain structures more successful in encouraging FLWs to perform a prosocial task? Further, can certain structures encourage FLWs to perform beyond the incentivized policy mandate?

Investigating workers' prosocial effort within policy implementation, the authors conducted a randomized lab-in-the-field inquiry with 344 Anganwadi-based workers (workers under the nutrition policy) in western India. These FLWs were engaged to perform a novel real-effort task that was tied to different incentive structures and their performance was adjudged based on measurable quantity, effort and quality parameters.

Results demonstrate that uncompensated workers invest the greatest amount of effort whilst compromising on task quality, and vice-versa for subjects receiving pay-for-performance compensation. Programs must account for policy focus when offering compensations: volunteer engagement may be counterproductive for quality focus and to the adherence to ancillary task mandates like nature/quality of beneficiary interaction. On the other hand, the distribution of products (like health goods) can rely on volunteer effort.

The study brings together various compensation schemes operating at the field level, under one study using an LFE methodology within the context of policy implementation in India.

Based on the referent cognitions theory (RCT), individuals compare their outcomes to a given reference point. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of centrality bias in subjective performance evaluation on two employees’ work behaviors; willingness to exert work effort and retaliation intention.

A 2  ×  2 × 2 between-subject real-effort task experiment was conducted on 162 Accounting and Management students. Centrality bias and level of task difficulty were each manipulated into two groups. Meanwhile, the level of performance was divided based on the average score of the real-effort task.

The experimental data were examined using MANOVA and PROCESS macro regression. It reveals that centrality bias negatively affects willingness to exert work effort through perceived procedural fairness and positively affects retaliation intention. These findings align with the RCT in explaining the perceived procedural fairness psychological mechanism and the work behavior resulting from an unfair evaluation procedure.

This study is the first of its kind to investigate the effect of centrality bias in subjective performance evaluation on positive and negative employee behaviors concurrently, which refers to the real-effort experimental task. The study demonstrates the significant impact of centrality bias on unwillingness to exert effort and adverse behavior.

We investigate whether giving workers autonomy through delegation of contract choice intrinsically motivates effort. In a novel laboratory experiment that controls for contract preferences and outcomes, principals can either choose the contract under which agents work on a real-effort task, or delegate the contract choice to the agents. We evaluate whether agents exert higher effort when they are allowed to choose the contract versus when the contract is imposed on them. We find no difference between the two conditions, even after controlling for baseline ability and for locus of control. Because our design excludes the possibility that preferences play a role, and because workers engaged in a real-effort task, this result casts doubt on an intrinsic link between the autonomy granted through delegation and the motivation of employees in the workplace. Our results do not deny, however, the possible instrumental benefits of autonomy (which did not play a role in our design) and their potentially powerful impact on motivation.

Group incentive schemes have been shown to be positively associated with firm performance but it remains an open question whether this association can be explained by the motivating characteristics of the group-incentive scheme itself, or if this is due to factors that tend to accompany group-incentive schemes. We use a controlled experiment to directly test if group-incentive schemes can motivate sustained individual effort in the absence of rules, norms, and institutions that are known to mitigate free-riding behavior.

We use a controlled lab experiment that randomly assigns subjects to one of three compensation contracts used to incentivize an onerous effort task. Two of the compensation contracts are group-incentive schemes where subjects have an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of their coworkers, and the third (control) is a flat-wage contract.

We find that both group-incentive schemes resulted in sustained, higher performance relative to the flat-wage compensation contract. Further, we do not find evidence of free-riding behavior under the two group-incentive schemes.

Although we do find sustained cooperation/performance over the three work periods of our experiment under the group-incentive schemes, further testing would be required to evaluate whether group-incentive schemes can sustain cooperation over a longer time horizon without complementary norms, policies, or institutions that mitigate free-riding.

By unambiguously showing that group-incentive schemes can, by themselves, motivate workers to provide sustained levels of effort, this suggests that the “1/n problem” may be, in part, an artifact of the rational-actor modeling conventions.

We demonstrate in a laboratory experiment that the effectiveness of performance-contingent incentives is inversely related to risk-aversion levels. For about 16.5% of participants, performance fails to improve under performance-pay, and the probability of such failure increases with risk-aversion. This phenomenon works in part through the reduced effort level of more risk-averse individuals when effort level is positively correlated with risk exposure. It is also associated with higher self-reported levels of stress by more risk-averse people working under performance-contingent pay. We find no evidence of such stress causing decrements in the quality of effort affecting performance after controlling for effort level. However, controlling for effort, more risk-averse participants perform better under a fixed salary, leaving less room for improvement under performance-pay.

We present an overview of research on spillover effects within firms and introduce a classification of the literature. We divide spillovers into either technological or social in nature. In our classification, a technological spillover is one in which an agent rationally responds to a cue in the workplace that does not rely on the identity or characteristics of a coworker. Social spillovers, on the other hand, may be thought of as arising from the social preferences of an individual or social norms established in the organization.

This paper provides an overview of the empirical findings on how relative performance information (RPI) affects employee behavior. Additionally, the review identifies future research opportunities based on a systematic analysis of the literature that incorporates findings across several disciplines and provides replicable, extensive coverage.

This paper addresses a research gap via synthesis, drawing on the empirical literature identified and analyzed systematically. A conceptual framework is developed to integrate the studies.

The effect of RPI on performance through enhanced effort is positive; moreover, publicity and performance-dependent compensation strengthen the effect. However, RPI has also been found to increase sabotage among employees, and it can lead to less honest reporting. Future research could examine critical mediators and moderators of the RPI-performance relationship and thus complement the findings. Additionally, the effects of group-based RPI remain underrepresented. Future work could help to assess in greater detail how RPI interacts with culture and norms and whether RPI is due to personal expectations. There is also room for further research regarding the effects of RPI on cooperation, its consequences for learning, how it affects budgeting decisions and its implications for risk taking.

This paper presents the first literature review in the field of RPI. It provides synthesized knowledge about whether RPI is beneficial or detrimental to organizational performance.

We study how giving depends on income and luck, and how culture and information about the determinants of others’ income affect this relationship. Our data come from an experiment conducted in two countries, the USA and Spain – each of which have different beliefs about how income inequality arises. We find that when individuals are informed about the determinants of income, there are no cross-cultural differences in giving. When uninformed, however, Americans give less than the Spanish. This difference persists even after controlling for beliefs, personal characteristics, and values.

This paper analyzes how different dynamics of changes in piece-rate incentives affect individuals' exerted effort.

The authors constructed an across-subjects three-period laboratory setting where, for each period, they exogenously manipulate the amount of piece-rate incentive paid for correct answer. The same experimental conditions were separately applied to two different laboratory tasks, one boring and the other entertaining.

It was found that performance contingent incentives affect participants' effort provision, while the effect is task dependent and it is much stronger for the boring task. Moreover, a unique increase in the amount of piece rate between periods leads to an increase in performance only for the boring task. A decrease in piece rate incentive between periods negatively affects subjects' performance on both tasks, but only provided that the decrease follows a previous increase.

The paper is the first to study the effect of a sequence of changes in the amount of piece rate incentives on individual effort provided. Our main result highlights the relevance of the order in which the sequence of changes in piece-rate incentive occurs. Results could be useful for the designing of performance rewards in organizations.

This paper is a study of how people with heterogonous individual characteristics self-select into different compensation schemes. A laboratory experiment is designed in which “workers” can join “companies” that pay according to various schemes: piece rate, revenue sharing, individual tournament, and team tournament. The main findings are: (1) Subjects with high relative performance always prefer individual tournament. (2) Risk-averse subjects are less likely to choose competitive schemes. (3) Individual tournament attracts fewer women than men, which is partially explained by gender-specific social preferences. (4) Compared to people with siblings, only children are less likely to accept any team-based schemes without information about their teammates. (5) The provision of feedback about relative performance can adjust individuals’ biased self-beliefs and then influence their self-selections.