Multitasking Incentives and Biases in Subjective Performance Evaluation

Shingo Takahashi, Hideo Owan, Tsuyoshi Tsuru and Katsuhito Uehara

No 614, Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: Subjective performance evaluation serves as a double-edged sword. While it can mitigate multitasking agency problems, it also opens the door to evaluators’ biases, resulting in lower job satisfaction and a higher rate of worker quits. Using the personnel and transaction records of individual sales representatives in a major car sales company in Japan, we provide direct evidence for both sides of subjective performance evaluation: (1) the sensitivity of evaluations to sales performance declines with the marginal productivity of hard-to-measure tasks, and (2) measures of potential evaluation bias we construct are positively associated with the incidence of worker quits, after correcting for possible endogeneity biases.

JEL-codes: M52 M55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2014-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-ger and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hermes-ir.lib.hit-u.ac.jp/hermes/ir/re/26820/DP614.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:hit:hituec:614

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hiromichi Miyake ().