Team Incentives, Task Assignment, and Performance: A Field Experiment

Josse Delfgaauw, Robert Dur and Michiel Souverijn
Additional contact information
Michiel Souverijn: Erasmus University Rotterdam

No 11228, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The performance of a work team commonly depends on the effort exerted by the team members as well as on the division of tasks among them. However, when leaders assign tasks to team members, performance is usually not the only consideration. Favouritism, employees' seniority, employees' preferences over tasks, and fairness considerations often play a role as well. Team incentives have the potential to curtail the role of these factors in favor of performance – in particular when the incentive plan includes both the leader and the team members. This paper presents the results of a field experiment designed to study the effects of such team incentives on task assignment and performance. We introduce team incentives in a random subsets of 108 stores of a Dutch retail chain. We find no effect of the incentive, neither on task assignment nor on performance.

Keywords: team incentives; task assignment; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 M12 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2017-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: The Leadership Quarterly, 2020, 31 (3), 101241

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11228.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Team Incentives, Task Assignment, and Performance: A Field Experiment (2017)
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:iza:izadps:dp11228

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().