Running them
Prior shared success predicts victory in team competitions
Satyam Mukherjee et al.
Nature Human Behaviour, January 2019, Pages 74–81
Abstract:
Debate over the impact of team composition on the outcome of a contest has attracted sports enthusiasts and sports scientists for years. A commonly held belief regarding team success is the superstar effect; that is, including more talent improves the performance of a team. However, studies of team sports have suggested that previous relations and shared experiences among team members improve the mutual understanding of individual habits, techniques and abilities and therefore enhance team coordination and strategy. We explored the impact of within-team relationships on the outcome of competition between sports teams. Relations among teammates consist of two aspects: qualitative and quantitative. While quantitative aspects measure the number of times two teammates collaborated, qualitative aspects focus on ‘prior shared success’; that is, whether teamwork succeeded or failed. We examined the association between qualitative team interactions and the probability of winning using historical records from professional sports — basketball in the National Basketball Association, football in the English Premier League, cricket in the Indian Premier League and baseball in Major League Baseball — and the multiplayer online battle game Defense of the Ancients 2. Our results show that prior shared success between team members significantly improves the odds of the team winning in all sports beyond the talents of individuals.
Job Security and Risk‐Taking: Theory and Evidence From Professional Football
Peter Slade & Tor Tolhurst
Southern Economic Journal, January 2019, Pages 899-918
Abstract:
This article investigates how job security impacts risky decision making. In a theoretical model, we show how risk‐taking can be affected by job security. Agents with moderate job security become more risk averse as their job security increases. Conversely, agents with very high (or low) job security act in a more risk neutral manner. We test these predictions using data on head coaching decisions from the National Football League, finding that job security has a negative and statistically significant effect on risk‐taking.
The Role of Work Schedules and the Macroeconomy on Labor Effort
Garrett Senney & Lucia Dunn
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate determinants of work effort using novel data from compressed air powered machinery in a large automotive plant. Work effort decreases monotonically across shifts, as industry-standard shift differentials do not fully compensate for the disutility of irregular shift times. Workers reduce their effective labor supply by exerting less effort rather than resorting to separation/renegotiation. Additionally, workers are found to respond to declining macroeconomic conditions by increasing work effort, presumably to avoid plant closure/layoff. Further support for this is seen by examining shift interactions with economic conditions which show the strongest effort effects for third, then second shift workers, in line with layoff risks.
Reconceptualizing goal setting’s dark side: The ethical consequences of learning versus outcome goals
David Welsh et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, January 2019, Pages 14-27
Abstract:
Goal-setting theory is one of the most researched and practically applied theories in the field of organizational behavior. A core tenet of this theory is that specific and challenging goals increase performance. However, recent behavioral ethics research has left unresolved questions regarding how high performance goals can be used to motivate performance without also encouraging unethical behavior. Drawing on achievement goal theory, we consider the role of goal type in arguing that an over-use of outcome goals as performance drivers and an over-reliance on goal difficulty as a motivating mechanism have both created goal-setting’s dark side and obscured potential remedies. Extending previous research, we integrate the goal-setting literature with regulatory focus theory to demonstrate that outcome goals stimulate a prevention focus, which increases unethical behavior as individuals engage in questionable conduct in order to prevent goal failure. This indirect effect is exacerbated as goal difficulty increases. In contrast to outcome goals, learning goals reduce prevention focus and unethical behavior without decreasing performance — even when goals are difficult. Across both field and laboratory studies, we find convergent support for our proposed model. Our findings extend existing theory and also offer practical insight into harnessing the motivating power of goals without simultaneously increasing unethicality.
The Power (of) Lunch and the Role of Incentives for Fostering Productive Interactions
Christopher Stanton et al.
Harvard Working Paper, September 2018
Abstract:
We carried out a field experiment in a sales organization to investigate the effects of employee interactions on productivity. Encouraging agents to talk about their sales process with a partner over lunch substantially lifted sales, with average increases of 20% that persisted after the study. These gains are larger than for the agents that were provided a weekly $50 prize per partner to improve joint sales, with the prizes doing little for agents receiving the combination of treatments. The gains are largest for agents paired for lunch with above-median partners. Survey responses indicate that agents who were encouraged to interact shared best practices whereas other groups did not.
Work from Anywhere or Co-locate? Autonomy versus Learning Effects at the United States Patent Office
Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi & Barbara Larson
Harvard Working Paper, November 2018
Abstract:
While employees might prefer work arrangements that offer greater autonomy, such as work from anywhere (WFA) policies, there are possible negative productivity effects of WFA, due to a lack of learning from co-located peers and increased coordination costs. We study the effects of WFA on productivity at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and exploit two features of the setting that lend themselves to econometric analysis: First, our setting allows us to tease out how the lack of opportunities to learn from co-located peers affects productivity. Second, we exploit a natural experiment in which the implementation of WFA was driven by negotiations between managers and the union of patent examiners, leading to exogeneity in the timing of individual examiners’ transition to WFA. We observe mixed results of WFA across experienced and new hires: for experienced hires, WFA results in a 3.9% increase in output and a 24% reduction in turnover, without affecting the proportion of rework. For new hires, an increase in output due to WFA is followed by an additional increase in rework, indicating a negative learning effect from the lack of colocation with experienced peers. We employ micro-data on cost of living, degree of autonomy, and proxies for examiner effort, to shed light on mechanisms. Back-of-the-envelope welfare estimates indicate that the 3.9% increase in patent grants at the USPTO could potentially create $1.16 billion in value for the U.S. economy.
Social Hiring: The Right LinkedIn Connection that Helps You Land a Job
Kyungsun "Melissa" Rhee, Elina Hwang & Yong Tan
University of Washington Working Paper, October 2018
Abstract:
This study investigates the characteristics of professional network connections that help individuals get a job referral. Focusing on the job seeker-employee dyadic tie, we examine how job similarity between an employee and a job seeker influences the likelihood of achieving a referral. In addition, we explore how hierarchical job level difference and gender homophily between a job seeker and an employee moderates the effect of job similarity on referral. Using unique data from a Fortune 500 global consulting company that utilizes LinkedIn connections for its hiring, we find that the likelihood of referral decreases as the job similarity between an employee and a job seeker increases. This result indicates that job seekers are less likely to be referred from employees who are doing similar jobs. We propose that this adverse job similarity effect is due to competition. That is, employees tend to prevent themselves from potential competitors. We further find that this competition effect is relieved as the hierarchical difference between a referring employee and a job seeker increases. Although we expect the gender homophily between a job seeker and an employee would be strong enough to dilute the competition effect, our result reveals that gender homophily does not overcome the adverse impact of job similarity on referral. Our findings suggest that job seekers need to be aware that not all connections of a professional online network are instrumental in getting a job referral.
More “team” than “fame”: Spin-off success in the US television sitcom industry
Pamela Adams, Roberto Fontana & Astrid Marinoni
Industrial and Corporate Change, December 2018, Pages 957–974
Abstract:
This article presents an application of recent management theories concerning the effect of pre-entry experience and knowledge transfer within the context of creative industries. The setting of the empirical research is the television situation comedy (sitcom) industry in the United States between 1949 and 2011. Specifically, we explore the factors that explain the survival rate of sitcoms and their spin-offs. We develop two sets of indicators to explore the effect of pre-entry experience: team similarity and star power based on the character/actor. Our findings show that spin-offs, or sitcoms that inherit character/actors and theme elements from a successful parent sitcom, have a greater likelihood to survive than de novo sitcoms. Even further, the greater the number of team members that not only worked with each other on previous shows but worked together on the same parent show, the better the performance of the spin-off. By contrast, star power, or the fame of the character/actor(s) that passes from the parent to the spin-off, shows no significant correlation with performance. We suggest that these results provide initial evidence that, consistent with the literature on spinouts in manufacturing industries, knowledge endowments represent an important source of performance heterogeneity in project-based industries.
Outcome Bias in Subjective Ratings of Performance: Evidence from the (Football) Field
Edgar Kausel, Santiago Ventura & Arturo Rodríguez
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The outcome bias occurs when people assess others’ decision making process or performance and put an unwarranted weight to their outcomes. This bias has important implications for the judgment and choice as well as the performance appraisal literatures. However, virtually every extant study has been conducted in the lab, likely due to endogeneity concerns in field. Penalty shoot-outs in association football (‘soccer’) offer an interesting way of studying outcome bias, as recent research suggests that their outcome is unrelated to in-game performance. We use Goal (goal.com) to study subjective performance ratings by reporters given to 1,157 players in 43 games from important football competitions. Using both multilevel mixed-effects and fixed-effects (within-players design) modeling, we found that winning on penalties was linked to higher performance ratings. This result persisted even after we removed players who took part in the penalty shoot-outs; thus, supporting the idea of outcome bias. We discuss implications for applied settings.