Relative Performance Feedback to Teams

William Gilje Gjedrem and Ola Kvaløy

No 6871, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Between and within firms, work teams compete against each other and receive feedback on how well their team is performing relative to their benchmarks. In this paper we investigate experimentally how teams respond to relative performance feedback (RPF) at team level. We find that when subjects work under team incentives, then RPF on team performance increases the teams’ average performance by almost 10 percent. The treatment effect is driven by higher top performance, as this is almost 20% higher when the teams receive RPF compared to when the teams only receive absolute performance feedback (APF). The experiment suggests that top performers are particularly motivated by the combination of team incentives and team RPF. In fact, team incentives motivate significantly higher top performance than individual incentives when the team is exposed to RPF. We also find notable gender differences. Females respond negatively to individual RPF, but even more positively than males to team RPF.

Keywords: teams; performance feedback; performance pay; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 M50 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Journal Article: Relative performance feedback to teams (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6871

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