Team Production benefits from a Permanent Fear of Exclusion

Anita Kopányi-Peuker, Theo Offerman and Randolph Sloof
Additional contact information
Theo Offerman: University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

No 15-067/VII, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: One acclaimed role of managers is to monitor workers in team production processes and discipline them through the threat of terminating them from the team (Alchian and Demsetz, 1972). We extend a standard weakest link experiment with a manager that can decide to replace some of her team members at a cost. The amount of contractual commitment (‘termination possibilities’) and the precision of the manager’s monitoring information serve as treatment variables. Our results show that the fear of exclusion has a profound effect on team performance even if workers are imperfectly monitored; the most flexible contract induces the highest output while the one with no firing possibilities leads to the lowest production. However, once the fear is eliminated for some workers, because permanent workers cannot be fired after a probation phase, effort levels steadily decrease.

Keywords: team-production; weakest-link game; exclusion; probation; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 M51 M55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/15067.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Team production benefits from a permanent fear of exclusion (2018)
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:tin:wpaper:20150067

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().