(De)Motivational Effects of Feeling (Dis)Trusted

Diya Abraham and Ondrej Krcal ()
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Ondrej Krcal: Department of Economics, Masaryk University, Brno

No em-dp2026-03, Economics Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Reading

Abstract: We investigate how workers’ motivation is influenced by whether they feel trusted or not by managers. In a laboratory experiment, responsibility for a manager’s earnings is divided unequally between two workers. We vary whether this decision is made by the manager or a random device on the manager’s behalf. Importantly, having more/less responsibility does not affect the workers’ wages. Despite this, we find that workers provide less effort when they are deliberately, vs. randomly, assigned lower responsibility. We find a smaller, less robust positive effect of learning one is more trusted. We examine two inter-related mechanisms and show that both beliefs about expected effort as well as emotions triggered when learning about the manager’s decision help explain our results.

Keywords: trust; vulnerability; motivation; social comparison (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D23 D91 J53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2026-05-25
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