Digital Social Pressure, Managerial Decision-Making and Worker Performance: Evidence from Professional Football

Andy Chung, Tin Cheuk Leung and James Reade
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Andy Chung: University of Reading, Global Labor Organization
Tin Cheuk Leung: Wake Forest University
James Reade: University of Reading

No 139, Working Papers from Wake Forest University, Economics Department

Abstract: Digital platforms expose workers and managers to immediate, public, and persistent evaluations from external audiences, creating a form of social pressure that may shape workplace decisions. We examine whether such digital social pressure predicts subsequent opportunity allocation and worker performance, using professional football as a high-frequency empirical setting. We link player-match data from Europe’s five major leagues to post-match Twitter commentary and construct measures of negative sentiment, toxicity, and racial abuse. Comparing players with themselves over time and teammates in the same current match, we find that greater negative sentiment is associated with a lower probability of appearing in the team’s next match. Toxicity shows a similar but less stable association, while racial-abuse intensity is imprecisely estimated when the measures enter jointly. By contrast, associations with performance conditional on a subsequent appearance are small and imprecise. Overall, the findings suggest that digital social pressure is reflected more strongly in the allocation of subsequent opportunities than in worker performance, showing how public evaluations generated outside formal organizational boundaries can become part of the reputational environment surrounding internal managerial decisions.

Keywords: digital social pressure; online criticism; managerial decision-making; worker performance; social media; professional football; racial abuse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 J24 J71 M54 Z22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41
Date: 2026-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-mid and nep-spo
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:wfuewp:023574

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