Employee Recognition and Performance: A Field Experiment

By Christiane Bradler, Robert Dur, Susanne Neckermann, Arjan Non. Management Sciences, 2016

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reports the results from a controlled field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of public recognition on employee performance. We hired more than 300 employees to work on a three-hour data-entry task. In a random sample of work groups, workers unexpectedly received recognition after two hours of work. We find that recognition increases subsequent performance substantially, and particularly so when recognition is exclusively provided to the best performers. Remarkably, workers who did not receive recognition are mainly responsible for this performance increase. This result is consistent with workers having a preference for conformity.

Subfields: Demography, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0e24580dca964fe9f1991656986051967b51710

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Citations in the corpus

What makes work meaningful and why economists should care about it (2020, result): “Nevertheless, studies relying on self-reported and experimental data have challenged the assumption that only monetary motivations matter in the labour market (Binder, 2016; Bradler et al., 2016; Hamermesh, 2018; Hamilton, 2000; Kosfeld et al., 2017; Preston, 1989; Stern, 2004).”
Awards Unbundled: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment (2014, background): “Tran and Zeckhauser (2012), Azmat and Iriberri (2010), and Dur et al. (2013) show positive effects of rank information on performance, while Bandiera et al. (2013) and Barankay (2012) find that this information reduces productivity.”