"The Good News about Bad News": Feedback about Past Organisational Failure Bad ist Impact in Worker Productivity

Vanessa Mertins, Sabrina Jeworrek and Michael Vlassopoulos

VfS Annual Conference 2018 (Freiburg, Breisgau): Digital Economy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Failure in organisations is a very common phenomenon. Little is known about whether past failure affects workers’ subsequent performance. We conduct a field experiment in which we follow up a failed mail campaign to attract new volunteers with a phone campaign pursuing the same goal. We recruit temporary workers to carry out the phone campaign and randomly assign them to either receive or not receive information about the previous failure and measure their performance. We find that informed workers perform better – in terms of both numbers dialed (about 14% improvement) and completed interviews (about 20% improvement) – regardless of whether they had previously worked on the failed mail campaign. Evidence from a second experiment with student volunteers asked to support a campaign to reduce food waste suggests that the mechanism behind our finding relates to contextual inference: Informing workers/volunteers that they are pursuing a goal that is hard to attain seems to add meaning to the work involved, leading them to exert more effort.

Keywords: contextual inference; feedback; failure; field experiment; meaning of work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J22 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-ppm
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc18:181644

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