Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP14299
Authors: Jason Sandvik; Richard Saouma; Nathan Seegert; Christopher Stanton
Abstract: What prevents the spread of information among coworkers, and which management practices facilitate workplace knowledge flows? We conducted a field experiment in a sales company, addressing these questions with three active treatments. (1) Encouraging workers to talk about their sales techniques with a randomly chosen partner during short meetings substantially lifted average sales revenue during and after the experiment. The largest gains occurred for those matched with high-performing coworkers. (2) Worker-pairs given incentives to increase joint output increased sales during the experiment but not afterward. (3) Worker-pairs given both treatments had little improvement above the meetings treatment alone. Managerial interventions providing structured opportunities for workers to initiate conversations with peers resulted in knowledge exchange; incentives based on joint output gains were neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge transmission.
Keywords: management practices; spillovers; peer effects; organizational design; randomized controlled trial (RCT)
JEL Codes: No JEL codes provided
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| structured meetings treatment (C92) | revenue per call (rpc) (L96) |
| structured meetings treatment (C92) | sales revenue (H27) |
| pair incentives treatment (C78) | sales revenue (H27) |
| pair incentives treatment (C78) | post-intervention sales (L14) |
| combined treatment (C32) | sales revenue (H27) |
| structured meetings treatment (C92) | knowledge transfer (O36) |