Title: “Work motivation and teams”
Authors: Simone Haeckl, Rupert Sausgruber and Jean-Robert Tyran
Abstract:
This paper presents a novel technique to measure motivation for working on a task using deviations from the money-maximising benchmark in a real-effort experiment. Although we find that average output increases in response to team incentives and observation, we also find that workers with high intrinsic motivation do not respond to team incentives. The reason is that highly motivated workers already work hard, and team incentives are not strong enough to overcome the high cost of additional effort.
The paper can be found here.