Ode to the sea: Workplace Organizations and Norms of Cooperation

Uri Gneezy, Andreas Leibbrandt and John List

No 20234, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The functioning and well-being of any society and organization critically hinges on norms of cooperation that regulate social activities. Empirical evidence on how such norms emerge and in which environments they thrive remains a clear void in the literature. To provide an initial set of insights, we overlay a set of field experiments in a natural setting. Our approach is to compare behavior in Brazilian fishermen societies that differ along one major dimension: the workplace organization. In one society (located by the sea) fishermen are forced to work in groups whereas in the adjacent society (located on a lake) fishing is inherently an individual activity. We report sharp evidence that the sea fishermen trust and cooperate more and have greater ability to coordinate group actions than their lake fishermen counterparts. These findings are consistent with the argument that people internalize social norms that emerge from specific needs and support the idea that socio-ecological factors play a decisive role in the proliferation of pro-social behaviors.

JEL-codes: C93 J0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-hrm, nep-lma and nep-soc
Note: EEE LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Published as Uri Gneezy & Andreas Leibbrandt & John A. List, 2015. "Ode to the Sea: Workplace Organizations and Norms of Cooperation," The Economic Journal, , pages n/a-n/a.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20234.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ode to the Sea: Workplace Organizations and Norms of Cooperation (2016)
Working Paper: Ode to the Sea: Workplace organizations and norms of cooperation (2014)
Working Paper: ODE TO THE SEA: WORKPLACE ORGANIZATIONS AND NORMS OF COOPERATION (2013)
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:nbr:nberwo:20234

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20234

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().