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Research report

Adverse Effects of Monitoring: Evidence from a field experiment

BP2-STS

    05.02.2021

51

Monitoring
Hidden Costs of Control
Remote work
Field experiment
English We conduct a field experiment with remote workers to assess potential adverse effects of monitoring. We find that monitoring reduces the average performance of workers, in particular among the intrinsically motivated workforce. Moreover, monitoring cultivates the average worker: There are fewer high performers and the variance in performance is significantly reduced. Importantly, we show that performance reductions primarily occur among challenging tasks. These performance reductions significantly increase unit costs in our setting. This effect is particularly severe when challenging tasks have high marginal value, as in high-performance work systems or when tasks are complementary inputs into the production function.
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Faculty
Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales et du management
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
Other electronic version

Faculté SES

Series statement
  • Working Papers SES ; 522
License
License undefined
Identifiers
  • RERO DOC 330189
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/309126
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