Rupert Sausgruber (University of Economics and Business) – Work motivation and team production

What type of workers respond to team incentives and peer pressure? To address this question, we develop a novel technique to measure a worker’s motivation to work hard as a deviation from optimal behavior in a real effort experiment. While we find that average output increases in response to team incentives and peer pressure, we find that highly motivated workers do not respond. The reason is that the highly motivated already work hard, and increasing effort even further is very costly to them. Our research sheds new light on sources of worker heterogeneity by providing a clean measure of work motivation and by showing that it moderates team effects.

Friday, March 9, 2018, 11:00 a.m.

Oesterreichische Nationalbank
Otto-Wagner-Platz 3, 1090 Wien