How Does Goal Setting Incentivize Workers in the Tournament Reward Scheme with Sabotage? Theory and Evidence

2018 Fiscal Year Research-status Report

• Project/Area Number: 18K12862
• Research Institution: International University of Japan
• Principal Investigator: Tang Cheng・Tao 国際大学, 国際関係学研究科, 講師(移行) (00799330)
• Project Period (FY): 2018-04-01 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: Tournament / Sabotage / Goal Setting

Outline of Annual Research Achievements

This project is corroborated with Lyla Change (Macquarie University, Australia). For the experiment design part, it has been conducted at the BizLab of the University of New South Wales BizLab. We implemented a 2 times 3 factor design for six treatments (a between-subjects design). We have done the data collection and data analysis of these 6 treatments. In general, our results hold along the dimension of "Low Winning Prize" of the experiment design, regarding how productive effort and sabotage activities contribute to the changes of organizational output. We are working on how to provide unified explanation for all treatment.

Current Status of Research Progress

3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.

Reason

Because some of the experiment results are not consistent with theory prediction. Specifically, we found that in the dimension of "High winning prize" in the experiment, the productive effort result is not consistent with theory prediction (it decreases), which prescribes productive effort should increase from "No Goal" to "Setting a Goal" and from "Low Goal" to "High Goal".

Strategy for Future Research Activity

We suspect that some other behavior considerations, ex. "give up", might play a role, although we are not sure which behavior consideration is most suitable for providing a consistent and unified explanation among all treatments. This part requires some more work on the literature searching. Alternatively, we may need to change our parameters setting in implementing the experiments such that subjects' participation constraint is not close to the boundary (the current design applies this parameters setup). Because current setup implies participation constraint is just met, which can be the reason of observing a "give up".

Causes of Carryover

Some expense of experiments implementation has been paid by the project corroborator in Australia. However, given that some more experiment may need to been implemented in the coming fiscal year, the incurring amount will be used for that purpose. Also, some funds will be used for traveling (attend conference and discuss research with coauthor) and facility purchasing (computer).