Properly Motivated
The Transparency Paradox: A Role for Privacy in Organizational Learning and Operational Control
Ethan Bernstein
Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using data from embedded participant-observers and a field experiment at the second largest mobile phone factory in the world, located in China, I theorize and test the implications of transparent organizational design on workers' productivity and organizational performance. Drawing from theory and research on learning and control, I introduce the notion of a transparency paradox, whereby maintaining observability of workers may counterintuitively reduce their performance by inducing those being observed to conceal their activities through codes and other costly means; conversely, creating zones of privacy may, under certain conditions, increase performance. Empirical evidence from the field shows that even a modest increase in group-level privacy sustainably and significantly improves line performance, while qualitative evidence suggests that privacy is important in supporting productive deviance, localized experimentation, distraction avoidance, and continuous improvement. I discuss implications of these results for theory on learning and control and suggest directions for future research.
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Strengthening State Capabilities: The Role of Financial Incentives in the Call to Public Service
Ernesto Dal Bó, Frederico Finan & Martín Rossi
NBER Working Paper, June 2012
Abstract:
We study a recent recruitment drive for public sector positions in Mexico. Different salaries were announced randomly across recruitment sites, and job offers were subsequently randomized. Screening relied on exams designed to measure applicants' intellectual ability, personality, and motivation. This allows the first experimental estimates of (i) the role of financial incentives in attracting a larger and more qualified pool of applicants, (ii) the elasticity of the labor supply facing the employer, and (iii) the role of job attributes (distance, attractiveness of the municipal environment) in helping fill vacancies, as well as the role of wages in helping fill positions in less attractive municipalities. A theoretical model guides each stage of the empirical inquiry. We find that higher wages attract more able applicants as measured by their IQ, personality, and proclivity towards public sector work - i.e., we find no evidence of adverse selection effects on motivation; higher wage offers also increased acceptance rates, implying a labor supply elasticity of around 2 and some degree of monopsony power. Distance and worse municipal characteristics strongly decrease acceptance rates but higher wages help bridge the recruitment gap in worse municipalities.
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Public Sector Employees: Risk Averse and Altruistic?
Margaretha Buurman et al.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a substantial reward and could choose between a widely redeemable gift certificate, a lottery ticket, or making a donation to a charity. Our analysis shows that public sector employees are significantly less likely to choose the risky option (lottery) and, at the start of their career, significantly more likely to choose the pro-social option (charity). However, when tenure increases, this difference in pro-social inclinations disappears and, later on, even reverses. Further, our results suggest that quite a few public sector employees do not contribute to charity because they feel that they already contribute enough to society at work for too little pay.
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Chung-An Chen
American Review of Public Administration, July 2012, Pages 437-460
Abstract:
Work attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction, job involvement, organizational commitment, etc.) have long been important indicators for managers and researchers in evaluating whether one is motivated to work. Existing empirical studies tend to suggest that public managers are less likely to exhibit positive work attitudes as compared with their private sector peers. However, literature about the comparison of work attitudes between public and nonprofit managers is scant. The current study addresses this topic. By using the National Administrative Studies Project-III (NASP-III) survey data, the author found that nonprofit managers are more likely than public managers to show positive work attitudes. This attitudinal difference, based on the results of mediation tests, originates from two important reasons. First, higher levels of rule constraints (i.e., red tape and personnel flexibility) in the public sector undermine managers' work attitudes. Second, individuals attracted to work in the public sector have stronger extrinsic motivation, stronger amotivation, and weaker intrinsic motivation. These motivation styles compromise their work attitudes.
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Whatever Is Willed Will Be: A Temporal Asymmetry in Attributions to Will
Erik Helzer & Thomas Gilovich
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do people neglect or underweight their past failures when thinking about their prospects of future success? One reason may be that people think of the past and future as guided by different causal forces. In seven studies, the authors demonstrate that people hold asymmetric beliefs about the impact of an individual's will on past versus future events. People consider the will to be a more potent determinant of future events than events that happened in the past. This asymmetry holds between- and within-subjects, and generalizes beyond undergraduate populations. The authors contend that this asymmetry contributes to the tendency for people to remain confident about their future performance in domains in which they have largely failed in the past. This research thus contributes to a growing body of literature exploring how thoughts about events in the past differ from thoughts about the same events set in the future.
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Theories of Willpower Affect Sustained Learning
Eric Miller et al.
PLoS ONE, June 2012
Abstract:
Building cognitive abilities often requires sustained engagement with effortful tasks. We demonstrate that beliefs about willpower - whether willpower is viewed as a limited or non-limited resource - impact sustained learning on a strenuous mental task. As predicted, beliefs about willpower did not affect accuracy or improvement during the initial phases of learning; however, participants who were led to view willpower as non-limited showed greater sustained learning over the full duration of the task. These findings highlight the interactive nature of motivational and cognitive processes: motivational factors can substantially affect people's ability to recruit their cognitive resources to sustain learning over time.
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Stephen Reicher, Alexander Haslam & Joanne Smith
Perspectives on Psychological Science, July 2012, Pages 315-324
Abstract:
The behavior of participants within Milgram's obedience paradigm is commonly understood to arise from the propensity to cede responsibility to those in authority and hence to obey them. This parallels a belief that brutality in general arises from passive conformity to roles. However, recent historical and social psychological research suggests that agents of tyranny actively identify with their leaders and are motivated to display creative followership in working toward goals that they believe those leaders wish to see fulfilled. Such analysis provides the basis for reinterpreting the behavior of Milgram's participants. It is supported by a range of material, including evidence that the willingness of participants to administer 450-volt shocks within the Milgram paradigm changes dramatically, but predictably, as a function of experimental variations that condition participants' identification with either the experimenter and the scientific community that he represents or the learner and the general community that he represents. This reinterpretation also encourages us to see Milgram's studies not as demonstrations of conformity or obedience, but as explorations of the power of social identity-based leadership to induce active and committed followership.
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Amy Welch & Mark Tschampl
Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In sports where an explosion of power or strength is necessary (e.g., weight lifting, tennis), athletes often yell or grunt to increase force production. Martial artists have used a similar technique for centuries called a kiap, but scientific evidence of its effectiveness is scarce. This study examined the effect of kiaping on strength and whether expertise influenced its effectiveness. Fifty (25 novices; 25 experts) martial artists completed a handgrip strength test under ‘no kiap' and ‘kiap' conditions. Performance for all participants was significantly better with the kiap (437.1 Newtons ± 94.9) than without (408.0 Newtons ± 90.6; p < .001).
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Jeffrey Bouffard & Tasha Kunzi
Crime & Delinquency, July 2012, Pages 514-538
Abstract:
A central proposition of Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) General Theory of Crime is the relative stability of low self-control, however research on "self-control strength" suggests that it may vary across contexts. The current study examines these differing conceptions by randomly assigning participants to one of two sexual arousal conditions or to a no-arousal condition. Group differences in the six components of self control, as captured on the Grasmick et al. (1993) scale were then examined. Unexpectedly, individuals in the most intense arousal condition actually reported higher self-control than those in the other conditions (both in absolute value and in changes in relative rank within the sample). Such findings provide additional empirical support for the recent conceptualization of self-control strength as a personal characteristic that can be both exercised and potentially depleted when overused.
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Commitment and Behavior Change: Evidence from the Field
Katie Baca-Motes et al.
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Influencing behavior change is an ongoing challenge in psychology, economics, and consumer behavior research. Building on previous work on commitment, self-signaling, and the principle of consistency, a large, intensive field experiment (N = 2,416) examined the effect of hotel guests' commitment to practice environmentally friendly behavior during their stay. Notably, commitment was symbolic - guests were unaware of the experiment and of the fact that their behavior would be monitored, which allowed them to exist in anonymity and behave as they wish. When guests made a brief but specific commitment at check-in, and received a lapel pin to symbolize their commitment, they were over 25% more likely to hang at least one towel for reuse, and this increased the total number of towels hung by over 40%. This research highlights how a small, carefully planned intervention can have a significant impact on behavior. Theoretical and practical implications for motivating desired behavior are discussed.
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Hakkyun Kim, Kyoungmi Lee & Ying-yi Hong
Self and Identity, Summer 2012, Pages 285-303
Abstract:
This research proposes a self-handicapping process in which people proactively endorse negative in-group stereotypes when there is the prospect of failure in a task. In Experiment 1, we found that women were more likely to endorse the math-gender stereotype stigmatizing their gender group when they anticipated a difficult versus easy math task. In Experiment 2, the same pattern was observed among men stigmatized with relatively poor verbal skills. In Experiment 3, we found that such a self-handicapping tendency was most prominent among individuals with high trait self-esteem, who are presumably more motivated to maintain self-esteem versus those with low trait self-esteem. All together, these results suggest that endorsing negative in-group stereotypes can be used as an anticipatory coping mechanism, occurring even before receiving failure feedback in the presence of a high risk of failure.
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Practice or Profits: Does the NFL Preseason Matter?
Nancy Ammon Jianakoplos & Martin Shields
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates whether the outcomes of National Football League (NFL) preseason games are predictors of regular season NFL performance. Using data from the 2002-2010 NFL seasons, the empirical analysis does not find that either a team's preseason winning percentage or a win in the third preseason game is a significant indicator of the team's regular season winning percentage. This result contrasts with previous findings that preseason game performance did provide an indicator of regular season performance for the 1970-1991 NFL seasons. Preliminary evidence is presented that suggests that the change in the importance of preseason performance in predicting regular season performance started around 1994.
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Goal Reversion in Consumer Choice
Kurt Carlson, Margaret Meloy & Elizabeth Miller
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do consumers manage goal conflicts before making a choice? This question was studied by examining emerging preferences in choices involving two products that were means to conflicting goals. These preference patterns revealed that an initially active goal, which had been set aside to reconcile a goal conflict, exerted greater than expected influence on the remainder of the choice process. This influence was manifest in a tendency for consumers to revert to the product aligned with the initially active goal upon seeing information that objectively favored neither product. The prevalence of the reversion (i.e., flip-flop) preference pattern suggests that activation of a set-aside goal escalates when it is set aside, much as if its pursuit had been impeded by an external force. In addition to revealing goal reversion in a variety of choice contexts, the studies in this article also find that goal reversion is moderated by goal conflict.
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Power and consumer behavior: How power shapes who and what consumers value
Derek Rucker, Adam Galinsky & David Dubois
Journal of Consumer Psychology, July 2012, Pages 352-368
Abstract:
The current paper reviews the concept of power and offers a new architecture for understanding how power guides and shapes consumer behavior. Specifically, we propose that having and lacking power respectively foster agentic and communal orientations that have a transformative impact on perception, cognition, and behavior. These orientations shape both who and what consumers value. New empirical evidence is presented that synthesizes these findings into a parsimonious account of how power alters consumer behavior as a function of both product attributes and recipients. Finally, we discuss future directions to motivate and guide the study of power by consumer psychologists.
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Induced power changes the sense of agency
Sukhvinder Obhi, Kristina Swiderski & Sonja Brubacher
Consciousness and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Power differentials are a ubiquitous feature of social interactions and power has been conceptualised as an interpersonal construct. Here we show that priming power changes the sense of agency, indexed by intentional binding. Specifically, participants wrote about episodes in which they had power over others, or in which others had power over them. After priming, participants completed an interval estimation task in which they judged the interval between a voluntary action and a visual effect. After low-power priming, participants judged intervals to be significantly longer than judgments after high-power or no priming. Thus, intentional binding was significantly changed by low-power, suggesting that power reduces the sense of agency for action outcomes. Our results demonstrate a clear intrapersonal effect of power. We suggest that intentional binding could be employed to assess agency in individuals suffering from anxiety and depression, both of which are characterised by reduced feelings of personal control.
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The Impact of Teleworking on Work Motivation in a U.S. Federal Government Agency
James Gerard Caillier
American Review of Public Administration, July 2012, Pages 461-480
Abstract:
Although work-related duties are performed via teleworking in all sectors, the U.S. federal government has taken the lead in offering telework arrangements to its employees; thereby causing a proliferation of the number of employees in the federal government who telework. In spite of this occurrence, public organization research has largely ignored the effect of teleworking on government employees. As a result, the goal of this article is to examine the association between several teleworking arrangements and work motivation in a federal government agency - a test of social exchange theory. After controlling for organizational, job, and individual characteristics, as well as mission attainment, the empirical analysis revealed that teleworkers (frequent and infrequent) did not consistently have higher levels of work motivation than nonteleworkers, providing only partial support for social exchange theory. The implications of these findings are thoroughly discussed in the article.
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Sticks and Carrots: The Effect of Contract Frame on Effort in Incomplete Contracts
Margaret Christ, Karen Sedatole & Kristy Towry
Accounting Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this study we examine the effect of incentive contract framing on agent effort in an incomplete contract setting. Prior research suggests that when governed by complete incentive contracts, agents exert greater effort under penalty contracts relative to bonus contracts. However, in an incomplete contract setting, in which the incentive contract does not govern all tasks for which the agent is responsible, the agent's trust in the principal is relevant. In this setting, we predict that bonus contracts create a more trusting environment, and this effect spills over to tasks not governed by the incentive contract, such that bonus contracts elicit greater effort on these tasks as compared to penalty contracts. We develop and experimentally validate a theoretical model of the effects of contract frame on trust and effort in this incomplete contract setting. The main intuition behind the model is that the framing of an incentive contract affects the degree to which the contract terms are interpreted by the agent as a signal of mistrust. More specifically, penalty contracts engender greater distrust than do bonus contracts, and therefore, when contracts are incomplete, penalty contracts lead to lower effort on tasks not governed by the contract than do bonus contracts.
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Bankruptcy behavior in the NFL: Does the overtime structure change the strategy of the game?
Kurt Rotthoff
Journal of Economics and Finance, July 2012, Pages 662-674
Abstract:
Companies in financial distress have an incentive to take on high-risk/high-reward projects, known as ‘bankruptcy behavior.' This paper investigates the activity of bankruptcy behavior outside of the corporate setting by analyzing the effects of the overtime structure in the NFL relative to College Football. In overtime, the first team to score in the NFL wins. In college football, however, both teams in overtime get a chance to score and the winner is decided when one team outscores the other. This structure causes different strategies for the NFL teams approaching overtime relative to college football teams. Using the variance in scoring throughout the game, I find evidence that NFL teams take on more risk late in the game to avoid overtime, or act as if they have bankruptcy behavior.
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Policy Timing and Footballers' Incentives: Penalties Before or After Extra-Time?
Liam Lenten, Jan Libich & Petr Stehlík
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Assessing the effect of the timing and sequencing of various policy regimes on optimizing agent behavior is both important and difficult. To offer some insights, this article examines a timing decision from sports. The penalty shootout in football (soccer) has long been seen as problematic, among other reasons because it creates incentives for excessively cautious play during extra time. One proposal to alleviate this has been to alter the timing, and stage the shootout before (rather than after) extra time with the result binding only if the subsequent extra time offers no resolution. Carrillo's (2007) theoretical model shows that since the effect of this rule change is ambiguous in theory, the proposal's desirability needs to be assessed empirically. Using a comprehensive match data set, the authors compare scoring outcomes of various treatment and control groups, whereby the former simulate closely players' incentives from the proposed rule change, and the latter represent the current timing. Most importantly, the authors examine how extra time scoring probabilities depend on a goal being scored in the first 5 (or 15) min of extra time. Their estimates suggest that bringing the shootout before extra time would substantially alter the players' incentives in extra time and produce more overall attacking play. Quantitatively, the rule change is predicted to increase the odds of extra time scoring about threefold. Specifically, for the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA club competitions, the probability of scoring in extra time is estimated to increase on average by 45-60%, depending on various factors such as the result in regulation time, balancedness of the teams, and home ground advantage. In summary, all these results suggest that the case for trialing the proposed rule is strong. More generally, they highlight the incentive channels through which sequencing of policies may determine their effectiveness.
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The Effect of Financial Contingencies on Golf Performance
James Bordieri et al.
Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current study investigated the effects of monetary contingencies on the performance of experienced golfers in the natural setting. Utilizing an ABCA reversal design counter balanced across tasks, investigators exposed participants to contingencies involving the ability to earn or lose money, based on performance. Results yielded a significant detriment to performance when monetary contingencies were implemented for non-professional golfers. Contrasting results in the performance of one professional golfer yielded no significant difference in performance across conditions. Results suggest that monetary wagers affect performance, and further, that performance of amateur players may be more easily influenced by such contingencies.