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Biased Supervision

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  • Josse Delfgaauw

    (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

  • Michiel Souverijn

    (Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands)

Abstract

Organizations can use subjective performance pay when verifiable performance measures are imperfect. However, this gives supervisors the power to direct employees towards tasks that mainly benefit the supervisor rather than the organization. We cast a principal-supervisor-agent model in a multitask setting, where the supervisor has an intrinsic preference towards specific tasks and may receive soft information on the agent's efforts. We show that subjective performance pay based on evaluation by a biased supervisor has the same distorting effect on the agent's effort allocation across tasks as incentive pay based on an incongruent performance measure. Combining incongruent performance measures with biased supervision can mitigate, but does not always eliminate this distortion. We apply our results to the choice between specialist and generalist middle managers, where a trade-off between monitoring ability and bias arises.

Suggested Citation

  • Josse Delfgaauw & Michiel Souverijn, 2014. "Biased Supervision," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 14-115/VII, Tinbergen Institute, revised 16 Jun 2016.
    • Handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20140115
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    subjective performance evaluation; middle managers; incentives; multitasking;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • M12 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - Personnel Management; Executives; Executive Compensation
    • M52 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects

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