Personal Relations and their Effect on Behavior in an Organizational Setting: An Experimental Study

Carles Solà and Jordi Brandts

No 300, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We study how personal relations affect performance in organizations. In the experimental game we use a manager has to assign different degrees of decision power to two employees. These two employees then have to make distributive decisions which affect themselves and the manager. Our focus is on the effects on managers' assignment of decision power and on employees' distributive decisions of one of the employees and the manager knowing each other personally. Our evidence shows that managers tend to favor employees that they personally know and that these employees tend, more than other employees, to favor the manager in their distributive decisions. However, this behavior does not affect the performance of the employees that do not know the manager. All these effects are independent of whether the employees that know the manager are more or less productive than those who do not know the manager. The results shed light on discrimination and nepotism and its consequences for the performance of family firms and other organizations.

Keywords: experiments; procedural fairness; Corporate Governance; Family firms; nepotism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D23 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/pol_antras_300x300-file.jpg (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Personal relations and their effect on behavior in an organizational setting: An experimental study (2010)
Working Paper: Personal Relations and their Effect on Behavior in an Organizational Setting: An Experimental Study (2009)
Working Paper: Personal Relations and their Effect on Behavior in an Organizational Setting: An Experimental Study (2006)
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:bge:wpaper:300

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().