Effect of mood and worker incentives on workplace productivity†

Decio Coviello, Erika Deserranno, Nicola Persico and Paola Sapienza

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2024, vol. 40, issue 2, 362-393

Abstract: We study the causal effect of mood on the productivity of call-center workers. Mood is measured through an online “mood questionnaire” which the workers are encouraged to fill out daily. We find that better mood actually decreases worker productivity for workers whose compensation is largely fixed. The negative effect of mood is attenuated for workers whose compensation is based on performance (high-powered incentives). This finding holds both at a correlational level and in two IV settings, where mood is instrumented for by weather or, alternatively, by whether the local professional sports team played/won the day before. We rule out a number of threats to the exclusion restrictions, and discuss the mechanisms that could generate our findings (JEL J24, J28, M52, C26).

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewac017 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:jleorg:v:40:y:2024:i:2:p:362-393.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization is currently edited by Andrea Prat

More articles in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().