Friday1Mar 2019

ESI Lecture Series

Joaquin Gomez-Minambres - Non-binding Goals in Teams: A Real Effort Coordination Experiment

Friday, March 1, 2019 3:00 p.m. PST
2019-03-01 15:00 2019-03-01 16:00 America/Los_Angeles ESI Lecture Series Go to event listing for more details: https://events.chapman.edu/61175 WH 116 Wilkinson Hall 116 - ESI Classroom Cyndi Dumas dumas@chapman.edu

Free to attend

WH 116

Wilkinson Hall 116 - ESI Classroom

Staff, Faculty, and Students

are invited to attend.

Abstract- Non-binding (wage-irrelevant) goals are easy to implement and ubiquitous in practice. These goals have been shown to improve individual performance, but it remains to be seen if such goals are effective in team production when there is production complementarity among workers. In this paper, we investigate the impact of non-binding goals, set by a manager, on a team of workers with “weak-link” production technology. Participants in our lab experiment act as either team workers or managers. A manager can set a non-binding goal for the team production, which is determined by the minimum (or weak-link) performance of its workers. Our experimental hypotheses are based on a model where goals act as references point for workers’ intrinsic motivation to complete the task. Consistent with our model we find evidence that team production does increase when managers are able to set goals and that this effect is strongest when goals are challenging but attainable for weak-link workers. However, we also find evidence that many managers persistently assign goals that are too challenging for weak-link workers, resulting in suboptimal team production, lower profits and higher wasted performance (performance above the weak-link level). We discuss the implications of these results and conclude that even though goals are effective motivators in teams some managers have difficulty overcoming personal biases when setting goals.

 

Bio- Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres is an Assistant Professor at Lafayette College. He earned his Ph.D. from the University Carlos III of Madrid. His research interests include personnel economics, behavioral economics and experimental economics. Broadly speaking, his research focuses on the role of workers’ non-monetary motivation and its interaction with standard monetary incentives. Joaquin’s work has appeared in such outlets as Journal of Economic Psychology, Management Science and Games and Economic Behavior.

 

You can contact the event organizer, Cyndi Dumas at dumas@chapman.edu.

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