Suchergebnisse

The mission of a job does not only affect the type of worker attracted to an organisation, but may also provide incentives to an existing workforce. We conducted a natural field experiment with 267 short-time workers and randomly allocated them to either a prosocial or a commercial job. Our data suggest that the mission of a job itself has a performance enhancing motivational impact on particular individuals only, i.e., workers with a prosocial attitude. However, the mission is very important if it has been actively selected. Those workers who have chosen to contribute to a social cause outperform the ones randomly assigned to the same job by about 15 percent. This effect seems to be a universal phenomenon which is not driven by information about the alternative job, the choice itself or a particular subgroup.

The mission of a job affects the type of worker attracted to an organization but may also provide incentives to an existing workforce. We conducted a natural field experiment with 246 short-term workers. We randomly allocated some of these workers to either a prosocial or a commercial job. Our data suggest that the mission of a job has a performance-enhancing motivational impact on particular individuals only, those with a prosocial attitude. However, the mission is very important if it has been actively selected. Those workers who have chosen to contribute to a social cause outperform the ones randomly assigned to the same job by about half a standard deviation. This effect seems to be a universal phenomenon that is not driven by information about the alternative job, the choice itself, or a particular subgroup.

By conducting a natural field experiment, we test whether a managerial policy of allowing employees to self-determine their wages is as successful as recently suggested by laboratory evidence. We find that this policy indeed enhances performance. However, our data is clearly at odds with the conjecture of Pareto improvements, since labor costs grow even faster. Admittedly, the performance change is remarkable given that a considerable pay increase has no effect at all. Surprisingly, the data suggests that explicitly denying parts of the workforce this choice boosts performance, too. Additional experimental and survey data provides important insights into employees' underlying motivations.

Failure in organisations is a very common phenomenon. Little is known about whether past failure affects workers' subsequent performance. We conduct a field experiment in which we follow up a failed mail campaign to attract new volunteers with a phone campaign pursuing the same goal. We recruit temporary workers to carry out the phone campaign and randomly assign them to either receive or not receive information about the previous failure and measure their performance. We find that informed workers perform better - in terms of both numbers dialed (about 14% improvement) and completed interviews (about 20% improvement) - regardless of whether they had previously worked on the failed mail campaign. Evidence from a second experiment with student volunteers asked to support a campaign to reduce food waste suggests that the mechanism behind our finding relates to contextual inference: Informing workers/volunteers that they are pursuing a goal that is hard to attain seems to add meaning to the work involved, leading them to exert more effort.

AbstractThis study aims to empirically determine success factors in the email marketing as a sub-discipline of online fundraising of nonprofit organizations (NPOs). Hereby, it responds to the gap of knowledge as existing research has not in detail touched nonprofit email marketing. To explore success factors in NPOs' email marketing, a detailed structural equation model, in which email marketing success acts as the final endogenous variable and the nine potential success factors function as formative latent exogenous variables, was developed. A quantitative survey was conducted with employees of NPOs from German-speaking countries. For data analysis, which was carried out with the software SmartPLS, 153 responses were utilized. Using aggregate and disaggregate analyses on the developed model, various critical success factors in NPOs' email marketing could be empirically identified. Furthermore, an importance-performance map analysis allowed the identification of the most crucial measures for increasing success, as a low performance of the NPOs faces a high total effect on email marketing success. From the results of the importance-performance map analysis, it was possible to derive specific practice-relevant action recommendations regarding measures in which NPOs should prioritize an increase in performance. Therefore, in addition to its theoretical relevance, the study also has a strong practical value.

Refugee integration needs broad support from society, but only a minority is actively engaged. Given that most individuals reciprocate kind behaviour, we examine the idea that the proportion of supporters is increasing as a reciprocal response to refugees' contributions to society through volunteering. Our nationwide survey experiment shows that the intentions to contribute time and money rise significantly when citizens learn about refugees' pro-social activities. Importantly, this result holds for individuals who have not been in contact to refugees so far. We complement this investigation by experiments in the lab and the field - which confirm our findings for actual behaviour.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a hot topic in management research. There is now widespread agreement that CSR is an important means for corporations to contribute to a fruitful interplay between business and society. Although CSR has an inherently normative foundation, the mainstream CSR discussion is rooted in an instrumental paradigm, within which scholars oft aim to uncover the business case for CSR, i.e. address the question whether and how CSR improves the corporate bottom line. In combination with the relative neglect of the normative foundation of CSR, the instrumentality of the debate results in the problematic tendency to reduce the notion of the social responsibility of business to single CSR activities that pay off for corporations. By implication, those CSR action fields for which the business case cannot be established in a straightforward fashion tend to receive little attention. Because in reality, many CSR action fields do not yield a readily discernible business case, the present debate is limited in its ability to provide guidance on how corporations can promote a fruitful interplay between business and society. In light of this, the present dissertation aims to contribute to the CSR discussion by developing instrumental approaches that explicitly enable CSR action fields without a readily discernible business case to be identified and addressed, both in theory and in practice. Collectively, the six papers collected in the present dissertation thesis indicate that for CSR to contribute to a fruitful interplay between business and society, it is important to approach CSR in a holistic fashion and conceptualize it as a management philosophy.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a hot topic in management research. There is now widespread agreement that CSR is an important means for corporations to contribute to a fruitful interplay between business and society. Although CSR has an inherently normative foundation, the mainstream CSR discussion is rooted in an instrumental paradigm, within which scholars oft aim to uncover the business case for CSR, i.e. address the question whether and how CSR improves the corporate bottom line. In combination with the relative neglect of the normative foundation of CSR, the instrumentality of the debate results in the problematic tendency to reduce the notion of the social responsibility of business to single CSR activities that pay off for corporations. By implication, those CSR action fields for which the business case cannot be established in a straightforward fashion tend to receive little attention. Because in reality, many CSR action fields do not yield a readily discernible business case, the present debate is limited in its ability to provide guidance on how corporations can promote a fruitful interplay between business and society. In light of this, the present dissertation aims to contribute to the CSR discussion by developing instrumental approaches that explicitly enable CSR action fields without a readily discernible business case to be identified and addressed, both in theory and in practice. Collectively, the six papers collected in the present dissertation thesis indicate that for CSR to contribute to a fruitful interplay between business and society, it is important to approach CSR in a holistic fashion and conceptualize it as a management philosophy.

We present a field experiment in which we set up a call-center to study how the productivity of workers is affected if managers treat their co-workers in an unfair way. This question cannot be studied in long-lived organizations since workers may change their career expectations (and hence effort) when managers behave unfairly towards co-workers. In order to rule out such confounds and to measure productivity changes of unaffected workers in a clean way, we create an environment where employees work for two shifts. In one treatment, we lay off parts of the workforce before the second shift. Compared to two different control treatments, we find that, in the layoff treatment, the productivity of the remaining, unaffected workers drops by 12 percent. We show that this result is not driven by peer effects or altered beliefs about the job or the managers' competence, but rather related to the workers' perception of unfair behavior of employers towards co-workers. The latter interpretation is confirmed in a survey among professional HR managers. We also show that the effect of unfair behavior on the productivity of unaffected workers is close to the upper bound of the direct effects of wage cuts on the productivity of affected workers. This suggests that the price of an employer's unfair behavior goes well beyond the potential tit-for-tat of directly affected workers.

AbstractWe conduct a field experiment to study how worker productivity is affected if employers act adversely towards their co-workers. Our employees work for two shifts in a call centre. In our main treatment, we lay off some workers before the second shift. Compared to two control treatments, we find that the lay-off reduces the productivity of unaffected workers by 12%. We find suggestive evidence that this result is not driven by altered beliefs about the job or the management's competence, but caused by the workers' perception of unfair employer behaviour. The latter interpretation is confirmed in a prediction experiment with professional HR managers. Our results suggest that the price for adverse employer behaviour goes well beyond the potential tit for tat of directly affected workers.