The Role of the Decision-Making Regime on Cooperation in a Workgroup Social Dilemma: An Examination of Cyberloafing

Brice Corgnet, Roberto Hernán-González and Matthew W. McCarter
Additional contact information
Roberto Hernán-González: Business School, Nottingham University, Jubilee Campus, Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK
Matthew W. McCarter: College of Business, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1 UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Roberto Hernán González

Games, 2015, vol. 6, issue 4, 1-16

Abstract: A burgeoning problem facing organizations is the loss of workgroup productivity due to cyberloafing. The current paper examines how changes in the decision-making rights about what workgroup members can do on the job affect cyberloafing and subsequent work productivity. We compare two different types of decision-making regimes: autocratic decision-making and group voting. Using a laboratory experiment to simulate a data-entry organization, we find that, while autocratic decision-making and group voting regimes both curtail cyberloafing (by over 50%), it is only in group voting that there is a substantive improvement (of 38%) in a cyberloafer’s subsequent work performance. Unlike autocratic decision-making, group voting leads to workgroups outperforming the control condition where cyberloafing could not be stopped. Additionally, only in the group voting regime did production levels of cyberloafers and non-loafers converge over time.

Keywords: autocratic decision-making; cyberloafing; group voting; social dilemma; workgroup performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/6/4/588/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/6/4/588/ (text/html)

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:gam:jgames:v:6:y:2015:i:4:p:588-603:d:58362

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().