Awards at work

Susanne Neckermann, Reto Cueni and Bruno Frey

Labour Economics, 2014, vol. 31, issue C, 205-217

Abstract: Social incentives like employee awards are widespread in the corporate sector and may be important instruments for solving agency problems. To date, we have little understanding of their effect on behavior. Unique panel data from the call center of a Fortune 500 financial services provider allow us to estimate the impact of awards on performance. Winning an award for voluntary work behaviors significantly increases subsequent core call center performance. The effect is short-lived, mainly driven by underperforming agents, and is reflected mostly in dimensions of the job that are hard to observe. We discuss various theories that could explain the effect.

Keywords: Employee awards; Worker effort; Non-pecuniary rewards; Insider econometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 J33 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537114000438
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Awards at work (2012)
Working Paper: Awards at work (2010)
Working Paper: Awards at work (2010)
Working Paper: Awards At Work (2009)
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:eee:labeco:v:31:y:2014:i:c:p:205-217

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2014.04.002

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().