Team Incentives, Social Cohesion, and Performance: A Natural Field Experiment

We conducted a field experiment in Dutch retail chain of 122 stores to study the interaction between team incentives, social cohesion, and performance. Theory predicts that effect incentives on performance increases with team’s cohesion because reduces free-riding behavior. In addition, may lead more coworker support or higher peer pressure thereby, can affect cohesion. introduced short-term randomly selected subset measured for all stores, both before after intervention, sales as well pressure. The average treatment incentive is 1.5 percentage points, which does not differ significantly from zero. line theory, estimated intervention. Social itself affected by incentives. This paper was accepted Yan Chen, decision analysis.