Full Citation
Title: Who Is More Useful? The Impact of Performance Incentives on Work and Personal Relationships
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2018
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Abstract: Employees today report being too busy to talk to their friends and family, even though the number of hours they work has remained relatively constant over the last five decades. We highlight incentive systems as one underappreciated factor contributing to this phenomenon and explore the role of incentives in shaping how employees think about their different social relationships. Results from one archival dataset, one panel survey, and two experiments (n = 132,139) show that when employees are paid for performance, they prioritize spending time socializing with work colleagues at the sacrifice of spending time with friends and family. We further document goal instrumentality as a mechanism for these results: employees who receive performance incentives perceive their work ties as highly instrumental in achieving their goals. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that incentives shape employees’ social interactions within and outside of work, potentially providing a novel explanation for the dissolution of familial and personal ties in many developed countries.
Url: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication Files/19-050_4d8c1a06-f665-421f-8957-9fa1ac46150f.pdf
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Authors: Hur, Julia; Lee-Yoon, Alice; Whillans, Ashley
Series Title: Harvard Business School Working Paper Series
Publication Number: 19-050
Institution: Harvard Business School
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Publisher Location: Cambridge
Data Collections: IPUMS Time Use - ATUS
Topics: Other
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