Peer Enforcement in Teams: Evidence from High-Skill Professional Workers with Repeated Interactions

Brad Humphreys and Jie Yang
Additional contact information
Jie Yang: University of Alberta, Department of Economics

No 14-24, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: Organizing employees into teams increases productivity but also generates incentives to shirk. Recent research suggests that peer enforcement plays an important role in deterring shirking in teams. We analyze 10 years of performance and compensation data for NFL offensive linemen, a high-skill, high-salary and repeatedly interacting team, using the Hausman-Taylor estimator to control for unobservable individual-specific heterogeneity. We find evidence that teammates’ effort signals reduce the salaries of individual offensive linemen, providing an optimal, low powered sanctioning mechanism for individual workers in this setting, and that a separate, independently monitored individual effort signal also reduces salaries.

Keywords: peer enforcement; teams; shirking; incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J3 J44 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-hrm and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent ... =econ_working-papers (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Chapter: Peer enforcement in teams: evidence from high-skill professional workers with repeated interactions (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wvu:wpaper:14-24

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Feng Yao ().