TY - JOUR
T1 - Overexertion of Effort under Working Time Autonomy and Feedback Provision
AU - Dohmen, Thomas
AU - Shvartsman, Elena
N1 - Funding Information:
? We would like to thank Daniela Puzzello, two anonymous reviewers, Simone Quercia, and conference and seminar participants at the 24th Colloquium on Personnel Economics (COPE), the Lüneburg Workshop in Microeconomics, the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, and the University of Trier for their useful comments and discussions. Elena Shvartsman acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant No. IZSEZ0 177659/1. Funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through CRC TR 224 (Project A05) and under Germany's Excellence Strategy EXC 2126/1-390838866 is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Maximilian Blesch, Jana Hofmeier, Thomas Neuber, and Rafael Suchy for excellent research support. All remaining errors are our own. This study is based on four treatments of an experiment described in the AEA RCT Registry (#0003532).
Data availability
The replication material for the study is available at DOI https://dx.doi.org/10.15185/izadp.16028.1
Funding Information:
We would like to thank Daniela Puzzello, two anonymous reviewers, Simone Quercia, and conference and seminar participants at the 24th Colloquium on Personnel Economics (COPE), the Lüneburg Workshop in Microeconomics, the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, and the University of Trier for their useful comments and discussions. Elena Shvartsman acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant No. IZSEZ0 177659/1. Funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through CRC TR 224 (Project A05) and under Germany's Excellence Strategy EXC 2126/1-390838866 is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank Maximilian Blesch, Jana Hofmeier, Thomas Neuber, and Rafael Suchy for excellent research support. All remaining errors are our own. This study is based on four treatments of an experiment described in the AEA RCT Registry (#0003532).
PY - 2023/8/1
Y1 - 2023/8/1
N2 - Working time autonomy is often accompanied by output-based incentives to counterbalance the loss of monitoring that comes with granting autonomy. However, in such settings, overprovision of effort could arise if workers are uncertain whether their performance suffices to secure the output-based rewards. Performance feedback can reduce or eliminate such uncertainty. We demonstrate in a laboratory experiment that a precautionary effort motive can lead to overprovision of costly effort in work environments with working time autonomy in the absence of feedback. A key feature of our design is that it allows for a clean measurement of effort overprovision by keeping performance per unit of time fixed, which we achieve by calibrating subjects’ productivity on a real effort task ex ante. This novel design can serve as a workhorse for various experiments as it allows for exogenous variation of performance certainty (i.e., by providing feedback), working time autonomy, productivity, effort costs, and the general incentive structure. We find that subjects provide significantly more costly effort beyond a level necessary to meet their performance targets in the presence of uncertainty, i.e., the absence of feedback, which suggests that feedback shields workers from overprovision of costly effort.
AB - Working time autonomy is often accompanied by output-based incentives to counterbalance the loss of monitoring that comes with granting autonomy. However, in such settings, overprovision of effort could arise if workers are uncertain whether their performance suffices to secure the output-based rewards. Performance feedback can reduce or eliminate such uncertainty. We demonstrate in a laboratory experiment that a precautionary effort motive can lead to overprovision of costly effort in work environments with working time autonomy in the absence of feedback. A key feature of our design is that it allows for a clean measurement of effort overprovision by keeping performance per unit of time fixed, which we achieve by calibrating subjects’ productivity on a real effort task ex ante. This novel design can serve as a workhorse for various experiments as it allows for exogenous variation of performance certainty (i.e., by providing feedback), working time autonomy, productivity, effort costs, and the general incentive structure. We find that subjects provide significantly more costly effort beyond a level necessary to meet their performance targets in the presence of uncertainty, i.e., the absence of feedback, which suggests that feedback shields workers from overprovision of costly effort.
KW - effort
KW - feedback provision
KW - incentives
KW - performance uncertainty
KW - subjective stress
KW - working time autonomy
U2 - 10.1016/j.jebo.2023.05.043
DO - 10.1016/j.jebo.2023.05.043
M3 - Article
SN - 0167-2681
VL - 212
SP - 1255
EP - 1266
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
JF - Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
ER -