Motivating Teams : Private Feedback and Public Recognition at Work
Aside from money, what works best to incentivize teams? Using a randomized field experiment, this paper tests whether fixed-wage workers respond better to receiving private feedback on performance or to competing for public recognition. Female scho...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/579061618249094209/Motivating-Teams-Private-Feedback-and-Public-Recognition-at-Work http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35443 |
| Summary: | Aside from money, what works best to
incentivize teams? Using a randomized field experiment, this
paper tests whether fixed-wage workers respond better to
receiving private feedback on performance or to competing
for public recognition. Female school feeding teams in 450
South African schools were randomly assigned to receiving
(i) private feedback: information on performance and ranking
using scorecards, (ii) public recognition: public ceremony
award for top performers, (iii) both feedback and award, or
(iv) no intervention. The analysis yields two main findings.
First, while private feedback and public award are more
effective when offered separately, receiving feedback on
performance boosts teams’ effort more than public
recognition. Second, image motivation crowds out intrinsic
motivation, especially for low-ability teams. This suggests
that providing performance feedback can be an effective
policy for leveraging intrinsic motivation and improving
service delivery, more so than mechanisms leveraging image motivation. |
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