The Impact of Beliefs on Effort in Telecommuting Teams

E. Dutcher and Krista Saral

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: The use of telecommuting policies remains controversial for many employers because of the perceived opportunity for shirking outside of the traditional workplace; a problem that is potentially exacerbated if employees work in teams. Using a controlled experiment, where individuals work in teams with varying numbers of telecommuters, we test how telecommuting affects the effort choice of workers. We find that differences in productivity within the team do not result from shirking by telecommuters; rather, changes in effort result from an individual.s belief about the productivity of their teammates. In line with stereotypes, a high proportion of both telecommuting and non-telecommuting participants believed their telecommuting partners were less productive. Consequently, lower expectations of partner productivity resulted in lower effort when individuals were partnered with telecommuters. Our results suggest that managers should actively engage in disseminating productivity in formation to their telecommuting team in order to avoid negative effects on productivity.

Keywords: Telecommuting; Team Production; Productivity; Economic Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 J21 J24 J28 M51 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31
Date: 2012-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-eff, nep-hrm, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c4041030/wpaper/2012-22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inn:wpaper:2012-22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Judith Courian ().