Workplace Democracy in the Lab

15 Pages Posted: 7 Feb 2011

See all articles by Philip Mellizo

Philip Mellizo

College of Wooster - Department of Economics

Jeffrey P. Carpenter

Middlebury College - Department of Economics; IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Peter Hans Matthews

Middlebury College - Department of Economics

Date Written: January 1, 2011

Abstract

While intuition suggests that empowering workers to have some say in the control of the firm is likely to have beneficial incentive effects, empirical evidence of such an effect is hard to come by because of numerous confounding factors in the naturally occurring data. We report evidence from a real-effort experiment confirming that worker performance is sensitive to the process used to select the compensation contract. Groups of workers that voted to determine their compensation scheme provided significantly more effort than groups that had no say in how they would be compensated. This effect is robust to controls for the compensation scheme implemented and worker characteristics (i.e., ability and gender).

Keywords: Real-Effort Experiment, Workplace Democracy, Decision Control Rights

JEL Classification: C92, J33, J54

Suggested Citation

Mellizo, Philip and Carpenter, Jeffrey P. and Matthews, Peter Hans, Workplace Democracy in the Lab (January 1, 2011). IZA Discussion Paper No. 5460, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1755998 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1755998

Philip Mellizo (Contact Author)

College of Wooster - Department of Economics ( email )

United States

Jeffrey P. Carpenter

Middlebury College - Department of Economics ( email )

Munroe Hall
Middlebury, VT 05753
United States
802-443-3241 (Phone)
802-443-2084 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://community.middlebury.edu/~jcarpent/index.ht

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Peter Hans Matthews

Middlebury College - Department of Economics ( email )

Munroe Hall
Middlebury, VT 05753
United States
802 443-5591 (Phone)
802 443-2084 (Fax)

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