Consequences of Cooperation: Linking Cooperative Attitudes, Behavior and Outcomes in a Large-scale Experiment
Final Report Abstract
We analyzed cooperation within a company setting in order to study the relationship between cooperative attitudes and financial as well as non-financial company rewards and other company outcomes. In total, 910 employees of a large software company participated in a monetarily incentivized online experiment. We observed high levels of cooperation and the typical conditional contribution patterns in a modified public goods game. When linking experiment and company record data, we observed that cooperative attitudes of employees do not pay off in terms of financial rewards within the company. Rather, cooperative employees seemed to be compensated by nonfinancial benefits such as recognition or friendship as the main reward medium. In contrast to most studies in the experimental laboratory, sustained levels of cooperation in our company setting related to non-financial benefits of cooperation rather than solely to financial incentives such as rewards or punishment. We also provided robust evidence for the external validity of experimental measures for cooperative behavior. We furthermore studied the relation between cooperation, social norm perception and incentive schemes. Participants coordinated on social norm perceptions with respect to behaviors that gave us a better understanding of the “cooperative culture” in the company. In the combined data set, we observed that contribution decisions significantly related to descriptive norms and beliefs about others’ contributions significantly related to injunctive norms. These relationships appeared to be independent of incentive schemes in the company. Our findings advanced the understanding of the origins and determinants of corporate culture. Economists and management scholars have argued that the scope of incentives to increase cooperation in organizations is limited as their use signals the prevalence of free-riding among employees. We exogenously varied whether managers had been informed about prevailing cooperation levels among employees before they could set incentives to promote cooperation. Comparing informed versus uninformed incentive choices, the data revealed strong positive effects of incentives that were unaffected by the hypothesized signaling effect. The absence of such effect seemed related to the perception of managers’ intentions, a mitigating factor that had not been explored in the literature so far. https://www.wiwo.de/erfolg/beruf/kooperation-teamarbeiter-sind-schlecht-bezahlt-aber-gluecklich/26932324.html https://www.n-tv.de/mediathek/audio/Egoisten-oder-Teamplayer-wer-erhaelt-mehr-article22102789.html
Publications
- (2020). Cooperation in a company: A large-scale experiment. Working Paper. IHS Working Paper 15/2020
Deversi, M., Kocher, M., Schwieren, C.
- (2020). Cooperation, free-riding, and the signaling value of incentives: An experiment in a company
Deversi, M.
