Getting More Work for Nothing? Symbolic Awards and Worker Performance

By Michael Kosfeld, Susanne Neckermann. Social Science Research Network, 2011

377 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ecb6e59473c6870b7f28ce376d990b840c5434b2

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Citations in the corpus

Organizational Control Systems and Pay-for-Performance in the Public Service (2013, background): “Ex-ante criteria for the awards usually are not clearly specified; thus, they do not provide incentives for employees to manipulate the criteria necessary to win an award (Frey & Neckermann, 2008; Kosfeld & Neckermann, 2011).”
A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments (2014, background): “Finally, several studies show how tournaments with no monetary prizes can be used as incentive mechanisms in the field (Kosfeld and Neckermann 2011; Barankay 2011).26 Kosfeld and Neckermann (2011), for example, design an experiment to study how symbolic awards impact individual behavior in the…”
Awards: A strategic management perspective (2016, methodology): “This insight is supported by laboratory experiments (Huberman, Loch, and Önçüler, 2004; Kosfeld and Neckermann, 2011) as well as field data.”
Rank Incentives: Evidence from a Randomized Workplace Experiment (2012, background): “…there is evidence that the treatment effect is larger for those sales with high effort substitution across brands, i.e. when the effort to sell one brand raises the cost of effort to sell other brands, as salespeople switch to selling other brands especially when their rank is worse than expected.”
Academic honors and performance (2014, background): “Among the few who have since followed suit are Besley (2005), Gavrila et al. (2005), Frey (2006, 2007), Malmendier and Tate (2009), Kosfeld and Neckermann (2011), Neckermann et al. (2014), and Frey and Gallus (2014).”
Shifting College Majors in Response to Advanced Placement Exam Scores (2017, neutral): “Other papers within the broader literature on the effects of positive signals of ability include Diamond and Persson (2016); Kosfeld and Neckermann (2011); Fryer, Levitt, and List (2008); and Steele and Aronson (1995). enter school quite optimistic about obtaining a science degree, but that…”
Employee Recognition and Performance: A Field Experiment (2016, methodology): “Following Kosfeld and Neckermann (2011), recognition consisted of a thank-you card, personally signed by the head of the research institute and handed out by a research assistant.”
The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance. NBER Working Paper No. 18165. (2012, neutral): “In CPS, we standardize scores within each grade, subject and testing period using the full population of CPS students.”