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Incentivizing team leaders: a firm-level experiment on subjective performance evaluation of leadership skills

Incentivizing team leaders: a firm-level experiment on subjective performance evaluation of leadership skills
Incentivizing team leaders: a firm-level experiment on subjective performance evaluation of leadership skills

In teamwork settings, providing effective leadership can be challenging for team leaders due to multitasking and the difficulty in measuring and rewarding leadership input. These challenges can lead to underprovision of leadership activities, ultimately impeding the productivity of the team. To address this problem, we conducted a field experiment at a manufacturing firm, introducing a relative subjective performance evaluation of team leaders' leadership activities by their managers, coupled with bonuses based on their leadership rank among all leaders. Our intervention increased other team members' productivity by approximately 7% while leaving team leaders' productivity unchanged and was profitable for the firm. During the intervention, we observed a positive correlation between the evaluations of team leaders and the productivity of team members, suggesting that the subjective evaluation was accurate and indeed increased leadership activities and thus productivity.

incentive schemes, leadership, multitasking, productivity, subjective evaluation, teamwork
1530-9134
Gall, Thomas
8df67f3d-fe3c-4a3f-8ce7-e2090557fcd4
Hu, Xiaocheng
92aa0e49-c45f-4788-8efd-ba48baa97db2
Vlassopoulos, Michael
2d557227-958c-4855-92a8-b74b398f95c7
Gall, Thomas
8df67f3d-fe3c-4a3f-8ce7-e2090557fcd4
Hu, Xiaocheng
92aa0e49-c45f-4788-8efd-ba48baa97db2
Vlassopoulos, Michael
2d557227-958c-4855-92a8-b74b398f95c7

Gall, Thomas, Hu, Xiaocheng and Vlassopoulos, Michael (2025) Incentivizing team leaders: a firm-level experiment on subjective performance evaluation of leadership skills. Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. (doi:10.1111/jems.12640).

Record type: Article

Abstract

In teamwork settings, providing effective leadership can be challenging for team leaders due to multitasking and the difficulty in measuring and rewarding leadership input. These challenges can lead to underprovision of leadership activities, ultimately impeding the productivity of the team. To address this problem, we conducted a field experiment at a manufacturing firm, introducing a relative subjective performance evaluation of team leaders' leadership activities by their managers, coupled with bonuses based on their leadership rank among all leaders. Our intervention increased other team members' productivity by approximately 7% while leaving team leaders' productivity unchanged and was profitable for the firm. During the intervention, we observed a positive correlation between the evaluations of team leaders and the productivity of team members, suggesting that the subjective evaluation was accurate and indeed increased leadership activities and thus productivity.

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e-pub ahead of print date: 23 April 2025
Keywords: incentive schemes, leadership, multitasking, productivity, subjective evaluation, teamwork

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 501072
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/501072
ISSN: 1530-9134
PURE UUID: dc8801c5-114a-4f04-8c63-c00d883bd3c5
ORCID for Thomas Gall: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-2257-1405
ORCID for Michael Vlassopoulos: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-3683-1466

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 22 May 2025 16:40
Last modified: 23 May 2025 01:45

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Contributors

Author: Thomas Gall ORCID iD
Author: Xiaocheng Hu

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