Work Motivation and Teams

Author(s)
Simone Haeckl, Rupert Sausgruber, Jean-Robert Tyran
Abstract

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.

Organisation(s)
Vienna Center for Experimental Economics, Department of Economics
External organisation(s)
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU), University of Copenhagen, Centre for Economic and Policy Research
No. of pages
43
Publication date
2018
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
502002 Labour economics, 502045 Behavioural economics
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/31863134-2932-48f3-80ca-89adb49ee2a9