Team building and hidden costs of control

Gerhard Riener and Simon Wiederhold ()

No 66, DICE Discussion Papers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)

Abstract: This paper investigates the interaction of intrinsic and extrinsic incentives. We propose a simple principal-agent model with control that incorporates the existence of social groups resulting from common experiences in the past. Our laboratory experiment shows that agents with previous common experiences with their principals (CE agents) perform better than agents without such experiences (NCE agents). However, as soon as actual control exceeds their expectation, CE agents decrease their performance substantially, which has no equivalent for NCE agents. This pronounced decrease in effort when control is perceived as excessive represents a novel channel through which hidden costs of control materialize. Our results have important implications for firms' strategies to motivate employees.

Keywords: Employee motivation; Principal-agent theory; Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D03 J22 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-cta, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-soc
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/10419/64547/1/726312843.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Team building and hidden costs of control (2016)
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:dicedp:66

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DICE Discussion Papers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().