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on Human Capital and Human Resource Management |
| By: | Maria De Paola; Francesca Gioia; Vincenzo Scoppa (Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF, Università della Calabria) |
| Abstract: | We ran a field experiment to investigate whether individual performance in teams depends on the gender of the leader. About 430 students from an Italian University took an intermediate exam that was partly evaluated on the basis of teamwork. Students were randomly matched in teams of three and in each team we randomly chose a leader with the task of coordinating the work of the team. We find a positive and significant effect of female leadership on team performance. This effect is driven by the higher performance of team members in female led teams rather than due to an improvement in the leader’s performance. We also find that, in spite of the higher performance of female led teams, male members tend to evaluate female leaders as less effective, whereas female members are more sympathetic towards them. |
| Keywords: | Team, Leadership, Gender, Stereotypes, Randomized Experiment |
| JEL: | J16 M12 M54 C93 |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:clb:wpaper:201801&r=hrm |
| By: | Kajackaite, Agne (WZB - Social Science Research Center Berlin); Sliwka, Dirk (University of Cologne) |
| Abstract: | Milton Friedman has famously claimed that the responsibility of a manager who is not the owner of a firm is "to conduct the business in accordance with their [the shareholders'] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible." In this paper we argue that when contracts are incomplete it is not necessarily in the interest even of money maximizing shareholders to pick a manager who pursues this goal. We show in a formal model and in a series of lab experiments that choosing a manager who has a preference to spend resources for social causes can increase employee motivation. In turn, ex-post losses in shareholder value may be offset by ex-ante gains in performance through higher employee motivation. |
| Keywords: | shareholder value, corporate social responsibility, incentives, motivation, experiment |
| JEL: | C91 D03 D21 J33 M52 |
| Date: | 2018–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11789&r=hrm |
| By: | Chen Liang (Department of Information Systems, W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, USA); Yili Hong (Department of Information Systems, W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, USA); Bin Gu (Department of Information Systems, W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, USA); Jing Peng (Department of Operations and Information Management (OPIM), School of Business, University of Connecticut, USA) |
| Abstract: | We explore whether there is a gender wage gap in the gig economy and examine to what degree gender differences in job application strategy could account for the gap. With a large-scale dataset from a leading online labor market, we show that females only earn around 81.4% of the hourly wage of their male counterparts. We further investigate three main aspects of job application strategy, namely bid timing, job selection, and avoidance of monitoring. After matching males with females using the propensity score matching method, we find that females tend to bid later and prefer jobs with a lower budget. In particular, the observed gender difference in bid timing can explain 7.6% of the difference in hourly wage, which could account for 41% of the gender wage gap (i.e. 18.6%) observed by us. Moreover, taking advantage of a natural experiment wherein the platform rolled out the monitoring system, we find that females are less willing to bid for monitored jobs than males. To further quantify the economic value of the gender difference in avoidance of monitoring, we run a field experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which suggests that females tend to have a higher willingness to pay (WTP) for the avoidance of monitoring. The gender difference in WTP for the avoidance of monitoring can explain 8.1% of the difference in hourly wage, namely, 44% of the observed gender wage gap. Overall, our study reveals the important role of job application strategies in the persistent gender wage gap. |
| Keywords: | gender wage gap; job application strategy; gig economy; quasi-natural experiment |
| JEL: | J16 J31 J24 D31 |
| Date: | 2018–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:net:wpaper:1803&r=hrm |
| By: | Böheim, René (University of Linz); Grübl, Dominik (University of Linz); Lackner, Mario (University of Linz) |
| Abstract: | We analyze performance under pressure and estimate the causal effect of audience size on the success of free throws in top-level professional basketball. We use data from the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the seasons 2007/08 through 2015/16. We exploit the exogenous variation in weather conditions on game day to establish a causal link between attendance size and performance. Our results confirm a sizeable and strong negative effect of the number of spectators on performance. Home teams in (non-critical) situations at the beginning of games perform worse when the audience is larger. This result is consistent with the theory of a home choke rather than a home field advantage. Our results have potentially large implications for general questions of workplace design and help to further understand how the social environment affects performance. We demonstrate that the amount of support, i.e. positive feedback, from a friendly audience does affect performance. |
| Keywords: | performance under pressure, choking, paradoxical performance effects on incentives, social pressure |
| JEL: | D03 J24 M54 |
| Date: | 2018–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11761&r=hrm |
| By: | María Victoria Anauati; Ramiro H. Gálvez; Sebastian Galiani |
| Abstract: | Economics places a strong emphasis on publishing in a narrow set of top tier journals. Given that venue reputation does not necessarily go hand in hand with citation performance, we study how citation patterns differ across journal tiers (top five, second tier, and top field). By analyzing citations of 6,083 articles, we find that citation patterns effectively vary greatly across tiers, affecting not only articles’ total citations but also their distribution through time (i.e., their life cycles). Moreover, the way patterns differ across tiers is strongly associated to articles’ success (measured by citation counts) and fields of economics research. |
| JEL: | A1 |
| Date: | 2018–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25101&r=hrm |
| By: | Liesa Schrand; Claudia Ascherl; Wolfgang Schaefers |
| Abstract: | Worldwide there are various norms in establishing senior executive including the Chief Executive Officer’s (CEO) compensation packages, with various academics trying to desegregate and shade some light on such a confidential side of our business world. The agency theory (Berle and Means 1932; Jensen and Meckling 1976) seems to be key in the justification of the business norms aligning the interests of executive management to those of investors in order to create long-term value and profit (Bebchuk and Fried 2003). Senior executive compensation entails agency costs which have to be paid, in order to reduce information asymmetries between shareholders and management (Tosi et al. 2000). Our study explores the constituent list of the FTSE/NAREIT United States Index from 2005 till 2015. The sensitivity of executive compensation to financial performance measurement variables is examined by applying a panel-data analysis, which includes executive compensation (ExecuCompustat) and financial performance (Thomson Reuters Datastream and SNL). This study yields information on how the compensation of executive management and CEOs in the real estate sector in the US is structured and how the compensation is influenced by the financial performance. This paper is the first to provide basic advice on how to design a management compensation system for listed real estate companies after the financial crisis with the purpose of management alignment to shareholders. |
| Keywords: | Agency Theory; CEO Compensation; CEO Power; Executive Compensation; Performance |
| JEL: | R3 |
| Date: | 2018–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arz:wpaper:eres2018_135&r=hrm |
| By: | Haoyuan Liu (McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, 2110 Speedway Stop B6500, Austin, TX 78712); Wen Wen (McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, 2110 Speedway Stop B6500, Austin, TX 78712); Andrew B. Whinston (McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, 2110 Speedway Stop B6500, Austin, TX 78712) |
| Abstract: | We study how the broadcasting of peer success on an enterprise digital platform affects worker productivity. Using sales workers in an IT service company as our research context, we leverage the unexpected resignation of several HR staff members as an exogenous shock to the sharing of peer success and implement a difference-in-differences estimation. The empirical evidence shows that sales workers exert less effort when peer success messages are absent. We next investigate how the framing of peer success messages may generate different forms of peer influence, and particularly explore two ways of framing—messages that highlight peer’s ability (i.e., ability-based messages) and messages that highlight peer’s effort (i.e., effort-based messages). We find that although both types of peer success messages have a positive influence on worker productivity, there exists important heterogeneity. For ability-based messages, workers respond most strongly if their peers are socially close or have worse historical performance. By contrast, the effect of effort-based messages does not vary by peer characteristics. |
| Keywords: | peer success, work effort, productivity, peer influence, online organizational communication, peer pressure, difference-in-differences |
| JEL: | J24 L86 M54 |
| Date: | 2018–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:net:wpaper:1808&r=hrm |
| By: | Bin Wang (City University of Hong Kong); Yu Zheng (Queen Mary University of London) |
| Abstract: | We provide a theory of how growth, corruption, and a low-powered public-sector pay scale coexist in a stable equilibrium in the early stage of China's development. The regionally decentralized authoritarian regime of China features lower-level government officials competing for promotion to a higher level in the government by generating local economic growth, and calls for high-powered incentives to elicit effort from the the officials. However, this is at odds with the generally low-powered public-sector pay scale in China. We propose a principal-agent model, where the principal represents the Chinese people's desire to pursue economic growth and the agents are the government officials delegated with production tasks and organized in a tournament, to address how a low-powered pay scale can effectively elicit effort in a tournament infested with widespread corruption. |
| Keywords: | Institution; Tournament; Corruption; China |
| JEL: | D73 J45 O43 P26 |
| Date: | 2018–10–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qmw:qmwecw:872&r=hrm |
| By: | Averett, Susan L. (Lafayette College); Bansak, Cynthia (St. Lawrence University); Smith, Julie K. (Lafayette College) |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the effects of a spouse's personality on earnings. We build on the growing literature spanning economics and psychology that investigates how personality traits affect one's own individual earnings. In particular, several of the big five personality characteristics (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness) have been shown to be predictors of own earnings. To our knowledge only one paper studies the relationship between spousal personality and labor market outcomes finding a strong correlation between the two. We extend this work to assess the linkage between spousal personality and earnings while accounting for the potential endogeneity of the selection into marriage. Using the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia Survey from 2001‐2013, we test which spousal personality characteristics affect earnings. Our results indicate that for men, having a conscientious wife raises his earnings while there is little consistent effect of husband's personality on his wife's earnings. |
| Keywords: | marriage, personality, earnings, HILDA, Five Factor Model, conscientiousness, assortative mating |
| JEL: | J12 J24 J31 |
| Date: | 2018–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11756&r=hrm |
| By: | Fulvio Castellacci (TIK Centre, University of Oslo); Clara Viñas-Bardolet (TIK Centre, University of Oslo) |
| Abstract: | Temporary contracts are increasingly used in academia. This is a major concern for non-tenured researchers, since weak job security may hamper job satisfaction. In spite of the relevance of this topic, scholarly research on the theme is scant. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the role of academic tenure for job satisfaction of researchers in European countries. The work uses data from the MORE2 survey, a recent large-scale representative survey of researchers in all European countries. The results show that, ceteris paribus, academics with a permanent contract are on average more satisfied with their job than those that are employed on a temporary basis. We also show that academic tenure is a relatively more important factor of job satisfaction for researchers at an intermediate stage of the career. Finally, we point out some important differences in the working of the model among European countries. Our hypotheses receive significant empirical support for the groups of Continental EU and Nordic economies, which combine high job satisfaction and good working conditions, on the one hand, with relatively weak job security for younger academics, on the other. |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tik:inowpp:20181008&r=hrm |