Team Incentives, Social Cohesion, and Performance: A Natural Field Experiment

Josse Delfgaauw, Robert Dur, Okemena Onemu and Joeri Sol
Additional contact information
Okemena Onemu: Leiden University
Joeri Sol: University of Amsterdam

No 19-045/VII, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: We conduct a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain with 122 stores to study the interaction between team incentives, team social cohesion, and team performance. Theory predicts that the effect of team incentives on team performance depends on a team's social cohesion. In particular, free-riding should be weaker when co-workers care more about each other. Conversely, team incentives may lead to more co-worker support or to higher peer pressure and thereby can affect the team's social cohesion. We introduce short-term team incentives in a randomly selected subset of stores and measure for all stores, both before and after the intervention, the team's sales performance, the team's social cohesion as well as co-worker support and peer pressure. The average treatment effect of the team incentive on sales is 1.5 percentage points, which does not differ significantly from zero. In line with theory, the estimated treatment effect strongly increases in social cohesion as measured before the intervention. We find that social cohesion itself is not affected by the team incentives. Our study illustrates the potential of complementing a field experiment with ex ante and ex post questionnaire data collection for the study of management practices, workplace behavior, and performance.

Keywords: field experiment; team incentives; social cohesion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-06-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/19045.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Team Incentives, Social Cohesion, and Performance: A Natural Field Experiment (2022)
Working Paper: Team Incentives, Social Cohesion, and Performance: A Natural Field Experiment (2020)
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:20190045

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 ().