Labor →
- 01 Jun 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Motivating Effort in Contributing to Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence
Results of this experiment involving 1,200 employees shows that workers have multiple underlying motivations to contribute to organizational betterment, consisting of a combination of monetary and altruistic incentives associated with the organization’s mission.
- 31 May 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Who Gets Hired? The Importance of Finding an Open Slot
A worker’s skills alone does not determine the job in which they are hired—or indeed, whether the worker is hired at all. The existence of slots or job positions means that even qualified workers may not be hired or may not be assigned to the job for which they are best suited when there is a superior applicant for that position.
- 08 Apr 2016
- Research & Ideas
How to Hire a Millennial
This is not your parents' workplace anymore, Joseph Fuller reminds us. Crucial for attracting millennial workers are flexible work arrangements, meaningful mentorship programs, and sense of mission. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 12 Feb 2016
- Op-Ed
The Real Jobs Tragedy in the US: We've Lost the Skills
Upgrading domestic skills is far more relevant to the future of American workers than potential job losses through expanded trade with other Pacific-rim nations, say Joe Fuller and Matt Sigelman. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 05 Jan 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
The Integrity of Private Third-party Compliance Monitoring
Michael Toffel and Jodi Short examine how conflict of interest and other risks lead to inaccurate monitoring of health, labor, and environmental standards.
- 21 Dec 2015
- Working Paper Summaries
Wage Elasticities in Working and Volunteering: The Role of Reference Points in a Laboratory Study
Nonprofit organizations often rely on reference points—explicit or implicit targets and goals—to encourage more effort from volunteers. This study finds that effort does tend to cluster around reference levels, so this may be perceived as a very effective strategy. Yet reference levels can potentially backfire: in response to higher volunteer wages or productivity, volunteers may reduce their effort so as to meet the reference level.
- 30 Nov 2015
- Research & Ideas
Donors Are Turned Off by Overhead Costs. Here’s What Charities Can Do
Elizabeth A. Keenan and colleagues find that charitable donors are willing to stomach the idea of overhead costs—as long as they know someone else’s donation is covering them. A field study helped one organization nearly triple its solicited donations. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 09 Nov 2015
- Working Paper Summaries
Toxic Workers
This paper identifies personality and situational factors that lead to a worker engaging in toxic behavior, including sexual harassment, workplace violence, and fraud.
- 09 Nov 2015
- Research & Ideas
These Employers Pay Higher Salaries than Necessary
Some employers using online freelance marketplaces for the first time pay more than they have to for workers. Why? An information imbalance that job seekers can exploit, as explained in research by professor Christopher T. Stanton. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 29 Sep 2015
- Research & Ideas
Work 3.0: Redefining Jobs and Companies in the Uber Age
Companies like HourlyNerd and Lyft are redefining the job marketplace—but government has not caught up to the shift. Mess this up and we’ll stifle a major driver of innovation, business creation, and jobs, argues Andrei Hagiu. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 24 Sep 2015
- Cold Call Podcast
Dangerous Mines: Saving Lives through Leadership
Cynthia Carroll’s breathtaking story about taking decisive action in the face of a complex and dangerous situation. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 02 Sep 2015
- What Do You Think?
What's Wrong With Amazon’s Low-Retention HR Strategy?
SUMMING UP Does Amazon's "only the strongest survive" employee-retention policy make for a better company or improved customer relationships? Jim Heskett's readers chime in. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 10 Aug 2015
- Research & Ideas
Why a Federal Rule on CEO Pay Disclosure May Get You In Trouble With Customers
The SEC is expected to adopt a rule requiring every public firm to disclose the ratio of the CEO's salary to the median salary of the firm's employees. And it turns out that customers prefer shopping from retailers with low pay ratios, according to new research by Bhavya Mohan, Michael Norton, and Rohit Deshpandé. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 06 Jul 2015
- Research & Ideas
Money and Quotas Motivate the Sales Force Best
Bonus programs are effective for motivating sales people, but also costly for companies to maintain. Doug Chung and Das Narayandas study several compensation schemes to see which work best. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 16 Jun 2015
- Working Paper Summaries
Paying Up for Fair Pay: Consumers Prefer Firms with Lower CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios
The pay ratio of CEOs to average workers has long been a question of interest to both employees and investors. It also matters to consumers, as shown by new research conducted by the authors of this paper. A firm with a high (1000 to 1) ratio needs to offer a 50 percent discount in order to garner as favorable consumer impressions as a firm with a low (5 to 1) pay ratio. Even if pay ratio disclosure does not become legally mandated, these results suggest that firms with low pay ratios relative to competitors may wish to begin to disclose this information voluntarily. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 04 Feb 2014
- Working Paper Summaries
From Crowds to Collaborators: Initiating Effort and Catalyzing Interactions Among Online Creative Workers
Online "organizations" are becoming a major engine for knowledge development in a variety of domains such as Wikipedia and open source software development. Many online platforms involve collaboration and coordination among members to reach common goals. In this sense, they are collaborative communities. This paper asks: What factors most inspire online teams to begin to collaborate and to do so creatively and effectively? The authors analyze a data set of 260 individuals randomly assigned to 52 teams tasked with developing working solutions to a complex innovation problem over 10 days, with varying cash incentives. Findings showed that although cash incentives stimulated a significant boost of effort per se, cash incentives did not transform the nature of the work process or affect the level of collaboration. In addition, at a basic yet striking level, the likelihood that an individual chooses to participate depended on whether teammates were themselves active. Moreover, communications among teammates led to more communications, and communications among teammates also stimulated greater continuous levels of effort. Overall, the study sheds light on how perspectives on incentives, predominant in economics, and perspectives on social processes and interactions, predominant in research on organizational behavior and teams, can be better understood. Key concepts include: An individual's likelihood of being active in online collaboration increases by about 41 percent with each additional active teammate. Management could provide communications channels to make the efforts of other members more visible. This is important in the design of systems for online work as it helps members to confirm that others are actively contributing. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 29 Oct 2013
- Research & Ideas
Do Employees Work Harder for Higher Pay?
In a recent field study, Duncan Gilchrist, Michael Luca, and Deepak Malhotra set out to answer a basic question: "Do employees work harder when they are paid more?" Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 24 Oct 2013
- Working Paper Summaries
When $3+$1 > $4: The Effect of Gift Salience on Employee Effort in an Online Labor Market
Do employees work harder when they are paid more? This study shows that paying above-market wages, per se, does not have an effect on effort. The authors offered an experiment in a field setting that allowed them to test for the conditions under which higher wages elicit higher effort. They hired three groups of workers for a data entry task on the online labor market oDesk.com, telling them all that this was a one-time job. Group one ("3") was hired at $3 per hour. Group two ("3+1") was also hired at $3 per hour, but before starting work, people in group two were told that there was unexpectedly extra money in the budget and they would instead be paid $4 per hour. Group three ("4") was hired directly at $4 per hour, so that the "extra" money would not signal a salient "gift" from the employer. Our findings show that higher wages in which the gift was salient (3+1) led to higher and more persistent effort. However, higher wages by themselves (4) had no effect on effort compared to the lower wage (3) condition. Moreover, higher effort in the 3+1 group was strongest for employees with the most experience on oDesk, and those who had worked most recently on oDesk-exactly the kind of workers for whom our $1 additional payment was likely to be most salient (e.g., because it is not common in this labor market). Key concepts include: An employer has the ability to set an employee's reference point, and giving a surprise gift can be more impactful than simply paying higher wages. Targeted gifts-aimed at those who are most likely to interpret the additional reward as a gift-can be a cost-effective mechanism to reward employees, improve morale and increase productivity. However, reciprocity and gift giving are unlikely to explain all types of "efficiency wages" (i.e., "above market" wages) as we see them in the world around us because high wages that are baked into the hiring wage contract do not elicit the same productivity increase, but may induce greater effort by increasing the desire to keep a high-paying job if continued employment is possible. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 04 Jun 2013
- Working Paper Summaries
Prosocial Bonuses Increase Employee Satisfaction and Team Performance
Designing effective incentive schemes is a central challenge for a wide range of organizations, from multinational corporations to academic departments. In pursuit of identifying the most effective strategies, organizations have devised an impressive variety of such bonuses, from fixed salaries to pay-per-performance, from commissions to end-of-year bonuses. In this paper, the authors suggest that the wide variety in such schemes masks a shared assumption: That the best way to motivate employees is to reward them with money that they then spend on themselves. The authors—Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, Elizabeth W. Dunn, and Jordi Quoidbach—propose an alternative means of incentivizing employees—what they term "prosocial bonuses"—in which organizations provide employees with bonuses used to engage in positive actions towards charities and coworkers, from donating money to remote countries to taking a coworker to lunch. The authors examine the impact of these prosocial bonuses on employee satisfaction and team performance, by reporting results from field experiments in settings ranging from bank employees in Australia to pharmaceutical sales representatives in Belgium to dodgeball teams in Canada. Overall, results suggest that a minor adjustment to employee bonuses—shifting the focus from the self to others—can produce measurable benefits for employees and organizations. Key concepts include: When organizations give employees the opportunity to spend money on others—whether their coworkers or those in need—both the employees and the company can benefit, with increased happiness and job satisfaction and even improved team performance. Prosocial bonuses can benefit both individuals and teams, on both psychological and "bottom line" indicators, in both the short and long-term. Prosocial bonuses could backfire if companies introduce them as a replacement for more standard bonuses, rather than as an additional incentive. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
Neurodiversity: The Benefits of Recruiting Employees with Cognitive Disabilities
Employers are increasingly finding fresh ideas and insights by recruiting workers with Autism Spectrum Disorder and other cognitive disabilities. Gary Pisano and Robert Austin discuss their case study, “SAP SE: Autism at Work.” Open for comment; 0 Comments.