Getting More Work for Nothing? Symbolic Awards and Worker Performance
21 Pages Posted: 12 Jul 2010
Abstract
We study the impact of status and social recognition on worker performance in a field experiment. In collaboration with an international non-governmental organization we hired students to work on a database project. Students in the award treatment were offered a congratulatory card from the organization honoring the best performance. The award was purely symbolic in order to ensure that any behavioral effect is driven by non-material benefits. Our results show that students in the award treatment outperform students in the control treatment by about 12 percent on average. Our results provide strong evidence for the motivating power of status and social recognition in labor relations with major implications for theory and applications.
Keywords: award, non-monetary incentives, status, social recognition, field experiment
JEL Classification: C93, M52
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Incentives and Prosocial Behavior
By Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole
-
Incentives and Prosocial Behavior
By Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole
-
Incentives and Prosocial Behavior
By Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole
-
Do Incentive Contracts Crowd Out Voluntary Cooperation?
By Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter
-
Do Incentive Contracts Crowd Out Voluntary Cooperation?
By Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter
-
Psychological Foundations of Incentives
By Ernst Fehr and Armin Falk
-
Psychological Foundations of Incentives
By Armin Falk and Ernst Fehr
-
Do Incentive Contracts Undermine Voluntary Cooperation?
By Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter
-
The Hidden Costs and Returns of Incentives - Trust and Trustworthiness Among CEOS
By Ernst Fehr and John A. List
-
Honesty in Managerial Reporting
By John Evans, R. Lynn Hannan, ...