Smarter Task Assignment or Greater Effort: the impact of incentives on team performance

Simon Burgess (), Carol Propper, Marisa Ratto, Stephanie von Hinke and Emma Tominey ()

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: We use an experiment to study the impact of team-based incentives, exploiting rich data from personnel records and management information systems. Using a triple difference design, we show that the incentive scheme had an impact on team performance, even with quite large teams. We examine whether this effect was due to increased effort from workers or strategic task reallocation. We find that the provision of financial incentives did raise individual performance but that managers also disproportionately reallocated efficient workers to the incentivised tasks. We show that this reallocation was the more important contributor to the overall outcome.

Keywords: Incentives; Public Sector; Teams; Performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J33 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2009-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Journal Article: Smarter Task Assignment or Greater Effort: The Impact of Incentives on Team Performance (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:cmpowp:09/215

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