In many environments, tournaments can elicit more effort from workers, except perhaps when workers can sabotage each other. Because it is hard to separate effort, ability and output in many real workplace settings, the empirical evidence on the incentive effect of tournaments is thin. There is even less evidence on the impact of sabotage because real world acts of sabotage are often subtle manifestations of subjective peer evaluation or “offce politics.” We discuss a real effort experiment in which effort, quality adjusted output and o?ce politics are compared under piece rates and tournaments. Our results suggest that tournaments increase e?ort only in the absence of offce politics. Competitors are more likely to sabotage each other in tournaments and, as a result, workers actually provide less e?ort simply because they expect to be the victims of sabotage. Adjusting output for quality with the rating of an independent auditor shrinks the incentive effect of the tournament even further since output tends to become more slipshod. "The person who says ‘I’m not political’ is in great danger... Only the fittest will survive, and the fittest will be the ones who understand their offce’s politics." Jean Hollands, quoted in Playing Offce Politics, Newsweek, 16 September 1985
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)