Is This Really Kneaded? Identifying and Eliminating Potentially Harmful Forms of Workplace Control

Guido Friebel, Matthias Heinz, Mitchell Hoffman, Tobias Kretschmer and Nikolay Zubanov

No 26065, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: In a large German bakery chain, many workers report negative perceptions of monitoring via checklists. We survey workers and managers about the value and time costs to all in-store checklists, leading the firm to randomly remove two of the most perceivedly time-consuming and low-value checklists in half of stores. Sales increase and store manager attrition substantially decreases, and this occurs without a rise in measurable workplace problems. Before random assignment, regional managers predict whether the treatment would be effective for each store they oversee. Ex post, beneficial effects of checklist removal are fully concentrated in stores where regional managers predict the treatment will be effective, reflecting substantial heterogeneity in returns that is well-understood by these upper managers. Effects of checklist removal do not appear to come from workers having more time for production, but rather coincide with improvements in employee trust and commitment. Following the RCT, the firm implemented firmwide reductions in monitoring, eliminating a checklist regarded as demeaning, but keeping a checklist that helps coordinate production.

Keywords: Organizations; monitoring; checklists; respect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/26065.pdf (application/pdf)

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:crm:wpaper:26065

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Moritz Lubczyk () and Matthew Nibloe ().