Workplace Democracy in the Lab

Philip Mellizo (), Jeffrey Carpenter and Peter Matthews
Additional contact information
Philip Mellizo: College of Wooster

No 5460, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: While intuition suggests that empowering workers to have some say in the control of the firm is likely to have beneficial incentive effects, empirical evidence of such an effect is hard to come by because of numerous confounding factors in the naturally occurring data. We report evidence from a real-effort experiment confirming that worker performance is sensitive to the process used to select the compensation contract. Groups of workers that voted to determine their compensation scheme provided significantly more effort than groups that had no say in how they would be compensated. This effect is robust to controls for the compensation scheme implemented and worker characteristics (i.e., ability and gender).

Keywords: real-effort experiment; workplace democracy; decision control rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 J33 J54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Journal Article: Workplace democracy in the lab (2014)
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