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Peer evaluations and team performance: when friends do worse than strangers
1Universidad de Nevarra, Spain.
Economic Inquiry
|February 15, 2012
Summary
Peer assessments in team profit allocation experiments reduce performance. Teams of acquaintances underperform compared to strangers due to undermined intrinsic motivation and increased negative reciprocity.
Area of Science:
- Behavioral economics
- Team dynamics
- Incentive mechanisms
Background:
- Investigating the impact of peer assessments on team performance in real-effort tasks.
- Examining how social relationships (acquaintances vs. strangers) influence the effectiveness of peer evaluation systems.
Observation:
- Real-effort team experiments were conducted using peer assessments for joint profit allocation.
- Performance was measured to compare teams composed of acquaintances versus strangers.
Findings:
- Peer assessments significantly reduced overall team performance.
- Teams of acquaintances demonstrated lower performance than teams of strangers under peer evaluation.
- Concerns about fairness and equality emerged as key determinants of peer assessments.
Implications:
- Peer evaluation systems may negatively impact team cohesion and intrinsic motivation, especially among friends or acquaintances.
- Careful consideration of social dynamics and equality concerns is crucial when implementing peer assessment mechanisms.
- Further research is needed to explore alternative incentive structures that preserve intrinsic motivation in teams.
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