11/29/2021
A read a bunch of management & leadership papers and have summarized the findings, with links to the papers.
Show Me the Amenity: Are Higher-Paying Firms Better All Around?
Do higher-paying firms offer more favorable work, or compensate for less favorable work? This recent working paper estimates the joint distribution of wages, amenities, and job satisfaction across firms.
First, high-paying firms are high-satisfaction firms because they offer better amenities: 81-92 percent of the rise in job satisfaction from moving to a higher-paying firm reflects improved non-wage aspects.
Second, workers, especially high-earners, are willing to pay for job satisfaction, gaining in amenity value at least 54-101 percent of the average wage when moving from the worst- to the best-amenity firms.
Third, since the elasticity of amenity value to wages across firms is positive (1.0-1.8), incorporating non-wage amenities nearly doubles the variance in total compensation across firms.
Teams vs. Crowds: A Field Test of the Relative Contribution of Incentives, Member Ability, and Emergent Collaboration to Crowd-Based Problem Solving Performance
Organizations are increasingly turning to crowdsourcing to solve difficult problems. This is often driven by the desire to find the best subject matter experts, strongly incentivize them, and engage them with as little coordination cost as possible. [H]ow to effectively incorporate team-based collaboration in a setting that has traditionally been individual-based. We find that temporal “burstiness” of team activity and the diversity of information exchanged among team members are strong predictors of performance, even when inputs such as incentives and member skills are controlled.
Our empirical analysis of our field experiment indicates: (1) a moderate effect for member skill and a weak effect for cash incentives on team performance; and, (2) large, positive effects of emergent collaboration on team performance, specifically related to the burstiness of team activities and information diversity, even when the effects of member skill and cash incentives are controlled.
Our statistical results indicate particularly large effects associated with burstiness. These effects are especially noteworthy, given that these crowd-based teams were distributed across the world and participating outside of “normal” organizational roles. Yet, we see that synchrony dynamics that one would expect to be important only to traditional face-to-face collaborations still prevail.
My Manager Moved! Manager Mobility and Subordinates’ Career Outcomes
What happens to workers when their managers are promoted or moved to a different part of the company?
We found that managerial mobility was associated with significant declines in merit raises and performance-related pay. Although we were not able to fully disentangle the relative contributions of changes in sponsorship and performance in driving this decline, our supplementary analyses suggested that a reduced propensity by new managers to engage in sponsorship, securing greater rewards for their subordinates, likely plays a substantial role in these declines in rewards. We also found that these effects could be surprisingly persistent, as a manager’s move two years previously continued to have an effect on subordinate rewards.
Subordinates were more likely to receive cross-group promotions following managerial mobility. This is consistent with our arguments that established manager-subordinate relationships may lead to relational inertia, and the disruption of these relationships may therefore facilitate cross-group advancement.
[W]e did not find that manager mobility was associated with reductions in promotions within groups, and in some specifications it was associated with increased promotion rates.
Consistent with our argument that declines in financial rewards and increases in cross-group promotions reflect the disruption of manager-subordinate relationships, we also found that the effects of managerial mobility were moderated by the duration of the manager-subordinate relationship prior to the move: the longer (and therefore more embedded) the relationship being disrupted, the greater the decline in subordinate rewards and the greater the increase in the rate of cross-group promotion.
An Experimental Study of Team Size and Performance on a Complex Task
The relationship between team size and productivity is a question of broad relevance across economics, psychology, and management science. For complex tasks, however, where both the potential benefits and costs of coordinated work increase with the number of workers, neither theoretical arguments nor empirical evidence consistently favor larger vs. smaller teams.
We find that individuals in teams exerted lower overall effort than independent workers, in part by allocating their effort to less demanding (and less productive) sub-tasks;
however, we also find that individuals in teams collaborated more with increasing team size.
Directly comparing these competing effects, we find that the largest teams outperformed an equivalent number of independent workers, suggesting that gains to collaboration dominated losses to effort.
Testing the babble hypothesis: Speaking time predicts leader emergence in small groups
[S]peaking time retains its direct effect on leader emergence when accounting for intelligence, personality, gender, and the endogeneity of speaking time.