Temptation at work

Alessandro Bucciol, Daniel Houser and Marco Piovesan

No 11-090, Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School

Abstract: To encourage worker productivity offices prohibit Internet use. Consequently, many employees delay Internet activity to the end of the workday. Recent work in social psychology, however, suggests that using willpower to delay gratification can negatively impact performance. We report data from an experiment where subjects in a Willpower Treatment are asked to resist the temptation to join others in watching a humorous video for 10 minutes. In relation to a baseline treatment that does not require willpower, we show that resisting this temptation detrimentally impacts economic productivity on a subsequent task.

Keywords: temptation; willpower; lab experiment. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2011-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Temptation at Work (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hbs:wpaper:11-090

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