The Impact of Management Practices on Employee Productivity: A Field Experiment with Airline Captains

By Greer K. Gosnell, John A. List, Robert Metcalfe. Journal of Political Economy, 2019

125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increasing evidence indicates the importance of management in determining firms' productivity. Yet causal evidence regarding the effectiveness of management practices is scarce, especially for skilled labor in the developed world. In a field experiment measuring commercial airline captains’ productivity, we test four distinct management practices: performance monitoring, performance feedback, target setting, and prosocial incentives. These practices—particularly monitoring and target setting—significantly increase captains' productivity on the targeted fuel-saving dimensions, with positive spillovers on job satisfaction and CO2 emissions. The study reveals an uncharted research opportunity to delve into the black box of firms to examine the determinants of productivity among skilled labor.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7d337afd68f4ac9bcbc00c3e9c03081a11393ad

Citations in the corpus

• Management and Shocks to Worker Productivity (2019, unknown): “A few recent studies have sought to understand which particular practices or skills matter most, though much work remains to be done in this regard (Bandiera et al., 2017; Bloom et al., 2018a, 2016; Gosnell et al., 2019; Hoffman and Tadelis, 2018).”