Compensation Matters: Incentives for Multitasking in a Law Firm

Ann Bartel, Brianna Cardiff-Hicks and Kathryn Shaw

No 19412, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Due to the limited availability of firm-level compensation data, there is little empirical evidence on the impact of compensation plans on personal productivity. We study an international law firm that moves from high-powered individual incentives towards incentives for "leadership" activities that contribute to the firm's long run profitability. The effect of this change on the task allocation of the firm's team leaders is large and robust; team leaders increase their non-billable hours and shift billable hours to team members. Although the motivation for the change in the compensation plan was the multitasking problem, this change also impacted the way tasks were allocated within each team, resulting in greater teamwork.

JEL-codes: J33 L23 L84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as “Incentives for Lawyers: Moving Away from "Eat-What-You-Kill,” (with Ann Bartel and Brianna Cardiff-Hicks), Industrial and Labor Relations Review, forthcoming.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19412.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:19412

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19412

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().