The Effect of Incentives in Non-Routine Analytical Team Tasks – Evidence from a Field Experiment

Florian Englmaier, Stefan Grimm, David Schindler and Simeon Schudy

VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Despite the prevalence of non-routine analytical team tasks in modern economies, little is known about how incentives influence performance in these tasks. In a field experiment with more than 3000 participants, we document a positive effect of bonus incentives on the probability of completion of such a task. Bonus incentives increase performance due to the reward rather than the reference point (performance threshold) they provide. The framing of bonuses (as gains or losses) plays a minor role. Incentives improve performance also in an additional sample of presumably less motivated workers. However, incentives reduce these workers’ willingness to “explore” original solutions.

Keywords: team work; bonus; incentives; loss; gain; non-routine; exploration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 C93 D03 J33 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/168286/1/VfS-2017-pid-3581-osp2.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Effect of Incentives in Non-Routine Analytical Team Tasks - Evidence from a Field Experiment (2018)
Working Paper: The Effect of Incentives in Non-Routine Analytical Team Tasks - Evidence From a Field Experiment (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc17:168286

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().