In this paper we present results from a large scale real effort experiment in an online labor market investigating the effect of performance pay and two common leadership techniques: Positive expectations and specific goals. We find that positive expectations have a significant negative effect...

We conduct a field experiment in a controlled work environment to investigate the effect of motivational talk and its interaction with monetary incentives. We find that motivational talk significantly improves performance only if it is accompanied by performance pay. Moreover, performance pay...

An increasing number of workers participate in online labor markets. In contrast to traditional employment relationships within firms, the interaction between online workers and their employers are short and impersonal, which makes motivating online workers more challenging. We present results...

We present a model in which a motivator can take costly actions - or what we call motivational effort - in order to reduce the effort costs of a worker, and analyze the optimal combination of motivational effort and monetary incentives. We distinguish two cases. First, the firm owner chooses the...

This paper develops a simple economic model to examine how leadership styles in organizations depend on the prevailing wage-setting conditions for workers. In particular, we examine a leader who can -- in addition to the use of monetary incentives -- motivate a worker by adopting leadership...

This paper develops a simple economic model to examine how leadership styles in organizations depend on the prevailing wage-setting conditions for workers. In particular, we examine a leader who can - in addition to the use of monetary incentives - motivate a worker by adopting leadership styles...

Why do some leaders use praise as a means to motivate workers, while other leaders use social punishment? This paper develops a simple economic model to examine how leadership styles depend on the prevailing labor-market conditions for workers. We show that the existence of a binding wage floor...

In the last decade, forced ranking systems where employees' bonuses depend on their rank assigned by superiors have become less popular. Whereas the inherently competitive structure of ranking systems provides high effort incentives, it might also increase incentives for misconduct. Previous...

This paper reports results of two controlled experiments on the behavioural effects of relative performance information (RPI) in different organizational structures. Our baseline study 1 focuses on a centralized organizational structure where employees are exogenously assigned to either a...

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on...