This experiment tests for a causal relationship between the meaning of work and employees' motivation to perform weil. The study builds on an existing employeremployee relationship, adding realism to the ongoing research of task meaning. Owing to an unexpected project cancelation, we are able to study how varying the information provided about the meaning of previously conducted work-without the use of deception, but still maintaining a high level of conh•ol-affects subsequent performance. We observe a strong decline in exerted effort when we inform workers about the meaninglessness of a job already done. Our da ta also suggests that providing a supplemental alternative meaning perfectly compensates for this negative performance effect. Individual characteristics such as reciprocal inclinations and trust prompt different reactions. The data also show that the meaning of work affects workers' emotions, but we cannot establish a clear relationship between emotional responses and performance.
In Germany, dependent employees take almost 30 days of paid vacation annually. We enquire whether an individual's trade union membership affects the duration of vacation. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the period 1985 to 2010 and employing pooled OLS-estimators, we find that being a union member goes along with almost one additional day of vacation per year. Estimations exploiting the panel structure of our data suggest that a smaller part of this vacation differential can be due to the union membership status, while self-selection effects play a more important role. JEL Classifications: J 22; J 33; J 51; J 81
We conduct a field experiment to study how worker productivity is affected if employers act adversely towards their co-workers. Our employees work for two shifts in a call-center. In our main treatment, we lay off some workers before the second shift. Compared to two control treatments, we find that the layoff reduces the productivity of unaffected workers by 12%. We find suggestive evidence that this result is not driven by altered beliefs about the job or the management's competence, but caused by the workers’ perception of unfair employer behavior. The latter interpretation is confirmed in a prediction experiment with professional HR managers. Our results suggest that the price for adverse employer behavior goes well beyond the potential tit-for-tat of directly affected workers.
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