TY - UNPB

T1 - Work Motivation and Teams

AU - Haeckl, Simone

AU - Sausgruber, Rupert

AU - Tyran, Jean-Robert

PY - 2018/9/14

Y1 - 2018/9/14

N2 - We provide a new measure of work motivation and show that motivation shapes the effects of team incentives and observation by peers on performance. In particular, we measure motivation to work hard as the deviation from the money-maximizing benchmark in a real-effort experiment. While we find that average output increases in response to team incentives and observation, we find that highly motivated workers do not respond. The reason is that highly motivated workers already work hard and increasing effort even further is very costly to them.

AB - We provide a new measure of work motivation and show that motivation shapes the effects of team incentives and observation by peers on performance. In particular, we measure motivation to work hard as the deviation from the money-maximizing benchmark in a real-effort experiment. While we find that average output increases in response to team incentives and observation, we find that highly motivated workers do not respond. The reason is that highly motivated workers already work hard and increasing effort even further is very costly to them.

KW - real-effort experiment

KW - cooperation

KW - team

KW - intrinsic motivation

KW - labors

U2 - 10.2139/ssrn.3239948

DO - 10.2139/ssrn.3239948

M3 - Working paper

T3 - University of Copenhagen. Institute of Economics. Discussion Papers (Online)

BT - Work Motivation and Teams

ER -