TEACHER TEAM-BASED INCENTIVES: EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL EXPERIMENT IN A CHINESE MIDDLE SCHOOL

Using a natural experiment, we examine the causal effect of a team incentive scheme on teachers in a Chinese middle school that intended to help the school’s students improve in their weak subjects. The scheme was successful, the average treatment effect is positively significant in math and total scores. The most improvement observed in top students’ weak subjects. The top students weak in math, English and social science improved in those subjects by 0.12, 0.10, 0.16 standard deviations, respectively. Students at the bottom 20% of the testing distribution also improved in Chinese and math.

Team Incentives, Social Cohesion, and Performance: A Natural Field Experiment

We conducted a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain of 122 stores to study the interaction between team incentives, team social cohesion, and team performance. Theory predicts that the effect of team incentives on team performance increases with the team’s social cohesion because social cohesion reduces free-riding behavior. In addition, team incentives may lead to more coworker support or to higher peer pressure and thereby, can affect the team’s social cohesion. We introduced short-term team incentives in a randomly selected subset of stores and measured for all stores, both before and after the intervention, the team’s sales performance and the team’s social cohesion as well as coworker support and peer pressure. The average treatment effect of the team incentive on sales is 1.5 percentage points, which does not differ significantly from zero. In line with theory, the estimated treatment effect increases with social cohesion as measured before the intervention. Social cohesion itself is not affected by the team incentives. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

Criteria and indicators for determining the efficiency of the school management team

The article reflects aspects concerning the degree of applicability of the criteria and indicators in determining the efficiency of the school management team. The indicators classified on social, cultural, psychological development domains, of teamwork skills and managerial skills highlight ways of transformation of the management team, incentive in the creation of a macro team of the school organization. Through applying the grid it follows the tendency of the managerial cadres to self-improvement, self-formation and amplification of the chances for the team to become effective.

Management Team Incentive: Dispersion and Firm Performance

ABSTRACT Recent theory suggests that firms incorporate synergistic interrelationships among executives into optimal incentive design (Edmans, Goldstein, and Zhu 2013). We focus on Pay Performance Sensitivities (PPS) and use dispersion in PPS across top executives as a proxy for the incentive design component shaped by an executive team's synergy profile. We model optimal PPS dispersion and use residuals from this model to measure deviations from optimal. We find that firm performance is increasing (decreasing) in the residual when PPS dispersion is too low (too high). We conjecture that deviations from optimal are sustained by adjustment costs, finding that firms only close around 60 percent of the gap between target and actual PPS dispersion over the subsequent year. Viewing a team's equity grants as a vector, we provide evidence that firms use subsequent equity grants to actively manage PPS dispersion toward optimality. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that the deleterious effect of deviations from optimal is decreasing in the duration of a team's tenure together, and increasing in the importance of effort coordination across team members for firm performance. JEL Classifications: M41.