Incentives, Social Comparison Costs, and the Proximity of Envy's Object

Tomasz Obloj and Todd Zenger
Additional contact information
Tomasz Obloj: GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We investigate the mechanisms that shape social comparison in organizations and generate social comparison costs. Drawing on the notions of inequity aversion and envy, we argue that heterogeneity in the strength and type of incentives provides an impetus for envy, and that the resulting social comparison costs are shaped not only by the magnitude of this impetus, but the distance of envy's objects. In other words, the more proximate socially, structurally and geographically are those one envies the larger the costly behavioral response. To test our predictions, we use a quasi-experimental event during which outlets of a retail bank, previously operating under homogenous incentives, were assigned to four distinct tournament groups with differing ex ante probabilities of winning a prize — an event that provides envy's impetus. We then explore how, for each outlet, the proximity of those assigned to more advantaged outlets — objects of envy — shape productivity responses. We find that organizational units with more socially, geographically, and structurally proximate peers assigned to ‘better' tournament groups decreased their productivity, when compared to peers whose objects of envy were more socially, geographically, and structurally distant. We also show that these effects are stable over time. We discuss implications of these results for organizational design and boundaries.

Keywords: Incentives; Social Comparison Costs; Envy; Organization Design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:wpaper:hal-02011401

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().