Peers at Work

By Alexandre Mas, Enrico Moretti. Social Science Research Network, 2009

1,504 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate how and why the productivity of a worker varies as a function of the productivity of her co-workers in a group production process. In theory, the introduction of a high productivity worker could lower the effort of incumbent workers because of free riding; or it could increase the effort of incumbent workers because of peer effects induced by social norms, social pressure, or learning. Using scanner level data, we measure high frequency, worker-level productivity of checkers for a large grocery chain. Because of the firm's scheduling policy, the timing of within-day changes in personnel is unsystematic, a feature for which we find consistent support in the data. We find strong evidence of positive productivity spillovers from the introduction of highly productive personnel into a shift. A 10% increase in average co-worker permanent productivity is associated with 1.7% increase in a worker's effort. Most of this peer effect arises from low productivity workers benefiting from the presence of high productivity workers. Therefore, the optimal mix of workers in a given shift is the one that maximizes skill diversity. In order to explain the mechanism that generates the peer effect, we examine whether effort depends on workers' ability to monitor one another due to their spatial arrangement, and whether effort is affected by the time workers have previously spent working together. We find that a given worker's effort is positively related to the presence and speed of workers who face him, but not the presence and speed of workers whom he faces (and do not face him). In addition, workers respond more to the presence of co-workers with whom they frequently overlap. These patterns indicate that these individuals are motivated by social pressure and mutual monitoring, and suggest that social preferences can play an important role in inducing effort, even when economic incentives are limited.

Subfields: Education, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3f33d9810eabfb9a375b4814a250fef03e0bdd9

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Citations in the corpus

Worker Absence and Productivity: Evidence from Teaching (2012, neutral): “In these respects, our approach is similar to Mas and Moretti (2009); they evaluate peer effects among supermarket cashiers using variation in productivity within workers over time and exploiting the fact that peers can only directly affect coworkers’ productivity after they arrive at work.”
Estimating spillovers using panel data, with an application to the classroom (2012, neutral): “13In Mas and Moretti (2009), measurement error is likely less of an issue due to the large number of time periods per individual in their data.”
Social Networks and the Decision to Insure (2015, methodology): “The experimental sites for this study were 185 randomly selected rice production villages included in the 2010 expansion of the insurance program, located in Jiangxi province, one of China’s major rice bowls.”
Peer effects in science: evidence from the dismissal of scientists in Nazi Germany (2012, background): “[22] Mas, Alexandre and Enrico Moretti (2009) "Peers at Work", The American Economic Review, vol.”
Letting Down the Team? Social Effects of Team Incentives (2012, neutral): “…We would like to thank Ted Bergstrom, Tom Chang, Uri Gneezy, Michael Kuhn, Peter Kuhn, Justin Sydnor, and participants at the Southwest Economic Theory Conference 2011, Southern California Conference in Applied Microeconomics 2011, the Society for Labor Economics 2011, University of…”
Contagion of pro- and anti-social behavior among peers and the role of social proximity (2019, background): “, 1990), productivity at work (Ichino and Maggi, 2000; Falk and Ichino, 2006; Mas and Moretti, 2009), juvenile behavior (Damm and Dustmann, 2014), and charitable giving (Meer, 2011; Smith et al.”
Do cooperative enterprises create social trust? (2012, neutral): “…pressure, which is the most typical feature of social relations in cooperating teams, has been described as a coordination mechanism that reduces shirking and free riding, therefore increasing team members’ trustworthiness (Mohnen et al. 2008; Mas and Moretti 2009; Degli Antoni and Portale 2011).”
How Close Is Close? The Spatial Reach of Agglomeration Economies (2020, background): “This would be consistent with evidence from Rosenthal and Strange (2008a, 2008b) and Mas and Moretti (2009) that proximity to productive workers tends to boost performance.”
The Economic Consequences of 'Brain Drain' of the Best and Brightest: Microeconomic Evidence from Five Countries (2010, neutral): “Similarly credible evidence of productivity spillovers in workplaces is mainly limited to single low-skilled occupations where data on effort and output are reliably measured, such as check-out (Mas and Moretti, 2009) and data entry (Kaur et al.”