IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rdg/emxxdp/em-dp2026-03.html

(De)Motivational Effects of Feeling (Dis)Trusted

Author

Listed:
  • Diya Abraham

    (Department of Economics, University of Reading)

  • Ondrej Krcal

    (Department of Economics, Masaryk University, Brno)

Abstract

We investigate how workers’ motivation is influenced by whether they feel trusted or not by managers. In a laboratory experiment, responsibility for a manager’s earnings is divided unequally between two workers. We vary whether this decision is made by the manager or a random device on the manager’s behalf. Importantly, having more/less responsibility does not affect the workers’ wages. Despite this, we find that workers provide less effort when they are deliberately, vs. randomly, assigned lower responsibility. We find a smaller, less robust positive effect of learning one is more trusted. We examine two inter-related mechanisms and show that both beliefs about expected effort as well as emotions triggered when learning about the manager’s decision help explain our results.

Suggested Citation

  • Diya Abraham & Ondrej Krcal, 2026. "(De)Motivational Effects of Feeling (Dis)Trusted," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2026-03, Department of Economics, University of Reading.
    • Handle: RePEc:rdg:emxxdp:em-dp2026-03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://research.reading.ac.uk/economics/wp-content/uploads/sites/87/2026/05/emdp202603.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General
    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • J53 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Labor-Management Relations; Industrial Jurisprudence

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rdg:emxxdp:em-dp2026-03. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alexander Mihailov (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/derdguk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.