Workplace Knowledge Flows

Christopher T. Stanton, Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma and Nathan Seegert

No 14299, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: What prevents the spread of information among coworkers, and which management practices facilitate workplace knowledge flows? We conducted a field experiment in a sales company, addressing these questions with three active treatments. (1) Encouraging workers to talk about their sales techniques with a randomly chosen partner during short meetings substantially lifted average sales revenue during and after the experiment. The largest gains occurred for those matched with high-performing coworkers. (2) Worker-pairs given incentives to increase joint output increased sales during the experiment but not afterward. (3) Worker-pairs given both treatments had little improvement above the meetings treatment alone. Managerial interventions providing structured opportunities for workers to initiate conversations with peers resulted in knowledge exchange; incentives based on joint output gains were neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge transmission.

Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (44)

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