Testing for Team Spirit - An Experimental Study

Abstract: It is often suggested that team spirit counteracts free-riding. Testing for team spirit with field data is difficult, however, due to an inherent identification problem. In this paper test for team spirit experimentally. In a team work task we vary subjects' information about relative team performance while we leave unchanged the structure of explicit incentives. We find that subjects contribute more to their team's project when teams observe each others' performance. We attribute this result to the enhancement of team spirit caused by asymmetric peer effects between observing teams.

Keywords: team spirit; peer effects; organization of work; public goods experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 H41 J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-pbe and nep-soc
Date: 2005-08-02
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 22
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