Thammasat University students interested in business, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, organizational behavior, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 11 June Zoom webinar on The trials and tribulations of entering a tournament workplace.
The event, on Tuesday, 11 June 2024 at 6pm Bangkok time, is presented by Loughborough University, Leicestershire, the United Kingdom.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of workplace competition.
According to the event webpage:
Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Visiting Fellow Professor Helena D. Cooper-Thomas will deliver a seminar on their research, fully titled ‘The trials and tribulations of entering a tournament workplace: The case of new Members of Parliament’.
Workplace tournaments are characterised by competitive environments where individuals vie for resources and advancement. Tournaments are particularly prevalent at senior levels, yet little is known about how elite newcomers experience and respond to such adversarial contexts. Professor Helena D Cooper-Thomas’ findings shed light on both the key tournament challenges faced by elite newcomers and how these newcomers use promote and protect reputational strategies to navigate such challenges. They also show that the most successful tournament newcomers develop sophisticated patterns of reputational strategy use early on. Their research raises intriguing questions about the practical implications of exposing elite newcomers to workplace tournaments. Is ‘trial by fire’ an efficient process for forging effective performers, or does it unnecessarily burn up those who could have contributed?
Professor Helena Cooper Thomas teaches organizational behavior at the Faculty of Business, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.
A research publication from 2013, After the Tournament: Outcomes and Effort Provision, was presented as a discussion paper by the IZA Journal of Labor Economics.
Its abstract:
Modeling the incentive effects of competitions among employees for promotions or financial rewards, economists have largely ignored the effects of competition on effort provision once the competition is finished. In a laboratory experiment, we examine how competition outcomes affect the provision of post-competition effort. We find that subjects who lose arbitrarily decided competitions choose lower subsequent effort levels than subjects who lose competitions decided by their effort choices. We explore the preferences underlying this behavior and show that subjects’ reactions are related to their preferences for meritocratic outcomes.
From the introduction:
Firms in some instances use competition among workers for bonuses and promotions— tournaments—to elicit optimal effort levels when effort is not fully contractible. The widespread usage of tournaments as an incentive mechanism has generated commensurate interest among economists: the extensive economics literature on tournaments has explored the effects of sabotage, prize and tournament structure, participant feedback, multiple contests, and other aspects of tournament design on effort provision.
Tournament models to date, however, overlook an important—and fundamental—feature of actual promotion tournaments: the end of the tournament is rarely the end of the road. In practice, tournament participants typically continue to exert effort on behalf of the firm after the tournament has concluded, allowing the tournament outcome to influence the posttournament workplace. Industrial/organizational psychologists have documented so-called “counterproductive workplace behaviors” (CWBs)—defined as “volitional acts that harm or are intended to harm organizations or people in organizations” ranging from increased dislike of coworkers to increased absenteeism and production sabotage following unfavorable promotion outcomes.
All of these studies likely understate the importance of CWBs because they rely on self-reports of CWBs. In this study, we use a laboratory experiment—which allows us to directly measure behavior analogous to CWBs in the form of effort reductions—to investigate whether and when tournament outcomes influence the post-tournament effort decisions of winners and losers and to provide evidence concerning the nature of the preferences that could rationalize the links we observe between tournament outcomes and post-tournament effort decisions.
We compare behavior in four treatments requiring subjects to make effort choices both during and after a tournament contest. Subjects in our primary treatment participated in 40 periods and were paired with a new subject in each period. […]
In “rule-based” tournaments, the partner with the higher output won and was awarded a higher payment than the loser. A quarter of all tournaments, however, were “random outcome” tournaments in which the outputs of the partners were disregarded and the winner determined arbitrarily with each partner having equal probability of winning. Subjects did not know whether a tournament was a “rule-based” or “random outcome” tournament until after they made their tournament effort choices. In the production stage, subjects knew both the results of the tournament and how the tournaments had been decided before making their costly effort choices. All subjects in the production stage earned one-third of their production stage output; the tournament winner also received one-fifth of the tournament loser’s production stage output. We introduce the “random outcomes” to allow subjects to feel “hard done by” on occasion in a tournament as feelings or perceptions of injustice have been shown to predict the emergence of CWBs.
In particular, perceptions of injustice may result from failure to win a promotion. […]
Controlling for this individual heterogeneity, we find that tournament outcomes have a significant influence on production stage effort choices only when the tournament is randomly decided. Subjects who lose in random outcome tournaments but who would have also lost in rule-based tournaments choose effort levels that are seven percent lower than the mean effort of tournament losers; subjects who lose in random outcome tournaments but would have won in rule-based tournaments choose effort levels that are thirteen percent lower than the mean effort of tournament losers.
We see similar production stage effort reductions in a treatment pairing tournament winners and losers with new partners in the production stage, indicating that the effort reduction is not aimed directly at a rival. We do find evidence, however, that effort reductions following arbitrarily decided tournaments may be a “hot state” reaction as subjects appear to withdraw effort only in the short run in a treatment in which a tournament is followed by multiple production stages with the same partner. Using survey instruments, we find that the 3 effort reductions in response to losing a randomly decided tournament are correlated with subjects’ preferences for merit-based outcomes. Losers who feel that outcomes should reflect their effort choices reduce their post-tournament effort more than other subjects when the tournament outcome disregards effort choices.
Our study makes three important contributions to economists’ understanding of the incentive effects of tournaments and competition more generally. First, our findings highlight the uncomfortable reality for firms that perceptions of promotion contests count. If workers believe a promotion contest to have been arbitrary, capricious, or unfair, they may exert less effort subsequently than had they lost “fair and square.” In the extreme, the industrial psychology literature suggests that workers who perceive a firm’s actions to be unfair may actively seek to harm the organization.
As such, it is in the interest of firms to promote transparency and objectivity when deciding promotion contests to avoid such grievances. Second, our findings indicate that tournaments are effective mechanisms for identifying individuals who exert high levels of effort in a variety of circumstances. If the productivity of a worker in a post-tournament firm is important—as presumably it is in most instances—then tournaments will be effective screening mechanisms. Finally, our study indicates that personality and preferences are related to post-tournament behavior. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of the non-monetary factors that motivate employees’ behavior—namely personality, preferences, and perceptions—for the design of incentive schemes.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)