The Impact of Management Practices on Employee Productivity: A Field Experiment with Airline Captains
Greer Gosnell,
John List and
Robert Metcalfe ()
Framed Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Abstract:
Increasing evidence indicates the importance of management in determining firms' productivity. Yet, causal evidence regarding the effectiveness of management practices is scarce, especially for high-skilled workers in the developed world. In an eight-month field experiment measuring the productivity of captains in the commercial aviation sector, we test four distinct management practices: (i) performance monitoring; (ii) performance feedback; (iii) target setting; and (iv) prosocial incentives. We find that these management practices -particularly performance monitoring and target setting- significantly increase captains' productivity with respect to the targeted fuel-saving dimensions. We identify positive spillovers of the tested management practices on job satisfaction and carbon dioxide emissions, and captains overwhelmingly express desire for deeper managerial engagement. Both the implementation and the results of the study reveal an uncharted opportunity for management researchers to delve into the black box of firms and rigorously examine the determinants of productivity amongst skilled labor.
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00666.pdf
Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Management Practices on Employee Productivity: A Field Experiment with Airline Captains (2020) 
Working Paper: The impact of management practices on employee productivity: a field experiment with airline captains (2020) 
Working Paper: The Impact of Management Practices on Employee Productivity: A Field Experiment with Airline Captains (2019) 
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:feb:framed:00666
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Framed Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesca Pagnotta ().