Smarter Task Assignment or Greater Effort: The Impact of Incentives on Team Performance

Burgess, Simon; Propper, Carol; Ratto, Marisa; Hinke, Stephanie von; Tominey, Emma

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2009.02331.x

Cited by 77 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Hence, the bonus amounts to 1.7% to 2.1% of store managers'pay in a six-week period. This is comparable to Burgess et al (2010), where employees could earn a bonus of about 3% of pay and managers a bonus of either 2% or 4%, depending on the treatment. In Bandiera et al (2007Bandiera et al ( , 2009), the bonus was considerably higher.…”

Section: Experimental Designmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…In particular, we stress the role of leaders in coordinating employees'complementary actions that jointly determine the team's success. We share this feature with Burgess et al (2010), who analyse the introduction of team pay-for-performance at the UK tax authorities. The incentive scheme covered only a part of the tasks that teams are responsible for.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Team incentives, task assignment, and performance: A field experiment

Delfgaauw

Dur

Souverijn

2020

The Leadership Quarterly

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. favor of performance -in particular when the incentive plan includes both the leader and the team members. This paper presents the results of a field experiment designed to study the effects of such team incentives on task assignment and performance. We introduce team incentives in a random subsets of 108 stores of a Dutch retail chain. We find no effect of the incentive, neither on task assignment nor on performance. Terms of use: Documents in JEL Classification:C93, M12, M52

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Section: Experimental Designmentioning

confidence: 70%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Team incentives, task assignment, and performance: A field experiment

Delfgaauw

Dur

Souverijn

2020

The Leadership Quarterly

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“…Working smarter (Burgess et al 2010) is no major driver of the treatment effect because reallocating labor hours between shifts takes time-at least a month under the company rules. The treatment effect, however, is stable in all months during the treatment period (see Table 7).…”

Section: A Alternative Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain

Friebel

Heinz

Krueger

et al. 2017

American Economic Review

185

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“…Keeping the 5 Running a regression with a coarser variable (size of towns) confirms this findings; the treatment effect is mainly driven by shops in large towns. 6 We find no evidence for alternative explanations of the treatment effect, such as management input, "working smarter" (Burgess et al, 2010) through work shift reallocation, or increased friendliness (which we measured by a mystery shopping tour). 7 In particular the last finding demonstrates how important the design of a compensation scheme is for determining effort choices by heterogeneous agents.…”

mentioning

confidence: 76%

Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain

et al. 2015

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Matthias Heinz University of Cologne and CEPR Miriam KrügerGoethe University Frankfurt Nick ZubanovGoethe We test the effectiveness of team incentives by running a natural field experiment in a retail chain of 193 shops and 1,300 employees. As a response to intensified product market competition, the firm offered a bonus to shop teams for surpassing sales targets. A bonus to teams rather than individuals was a natural choice because the firm does not measure individual performance and relies on flexible task allocation among employees. On average, the team bonus increases sales and customer visits in the treated shops by around 3%, and wages by 2.3%. The bonus is highly profitable for the firm, generating for each bonus dollar an extra $3.80 of sales, and $2.10 of operational profit. The results show the importance of complementarities within teams and suggest that improved operational efficiency is the main mechanism behind the treatment effect. Our analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects offers a number of insights about the anatomy of teamwork. The firm decided to roll out the bonus to all of its shops, and the performance of treatment and control shops converged after the roll-out. 2

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Smarter Task Assignment or Greater Effort: The Impact of Incentives on Team Performance

Cited by 77 publications

References 12 publications

Team incentives, task assignment, and performance: A field experiment

Team incentives, task assignment, and performance: A field experiment

Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain

Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain

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