Testing for Team Spirit - An Experimental Study

It is often suggested that team spirit counteracts free-riding. Testing for team spirit with field data is difficult, however, due to an inherent identification problem. In this paper test for team spirit experimentally. In a team work task we vary subjects' information about relative team performance while we leave unchanged the structure of explicit incentives. We find that subjects contribute more to their team's project when teams observe each others' performance. We attribute this result to the enhancement of team spirit caused by asymmetric peer effects between observing teams.