Competition, Group Identity, and Social Networks in the Workplace: Evidence from a Chinese Textile Firm

Takao Kato and Pian Shu ()
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Pian Shu: Georgia Institute of Technology

No 6219, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Using data on team assignment and weekly output for all weavers in an urban Chinese textile firm between April 2003 and March 2004, this paper studies a) how randomly assigned teammates affect an individual worker's behavior under a tournament-style incentive scheme, and b) how such effects interact with exogenously formed social networks in the manufacturing workplace. First, we find that a worker's performance improves when the average ability of her teammates increases. Second, we exploit the exogenous variations in workers' origins in the presence of the well-documented social divide between urban resident workers and rural migrant workers in large urban Chinese firms, and show that the coworker effects are only present if the teammates are of a different origin. In other words, workers do not act on pecuniary incentives to outperform teammates who are from the same social network. Our results point to the important role of group identities in overcoming self-interests and facilitating altruistic behavior.

Keywords: social networks; coworker effects in the workplace; intergroup competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 L2 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-dev, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-hrm, nep-lab, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - revised version published as 'Social Networks and Economic Transformation: Evidence from a Resettled Village in Brazil' in: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2016, 131 (Part A), 37–50

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