Abstract
Why do workers decline promotion opportunities even when advancement is feasible and associated with higher pay? This study investigates supply-side barriers to promotion by examining whether workers' willingness to accept leadership roles is limited by underestimation of the on-the-job learning due to their low current interpersonal skills. Motivated by our survey results of factory workers, we conduct a two-stage randomized controlled trial with vocational students and factory workers. Students are organized into three-person production teams that complete a sequence of manufacturing tasks designed to simulate a factory production environment. The experiment consists of two production rounds with opportunities to choose or accept a leadership role. The design introduces three sources of randomized variation. First, participants are randomly assigned to the leadership role in the initial production round, generating exogenous leadership experience. Second, teams are randomized to environments that vary the difficulty of the leadership task, implemented through production shocks that require groups to adjust their production plan. Third, an information intervention is delivered between production rounds to a subset of participants. The intervention aims to address potential projection bias by providing information about learning-by-doing in leadership roles through a short video in which experienced leaders share their past experiences. In the factory setting, a similar video-based information intervention is integrated into the promotion process. The primary outcomes include participants’ willingness to take leadership roles in subsequent production rounds. By experimentally varying both leadership exposure and information about skill acquisition, the study seeks to assess whether underestimation of on-the-job learning represent important frictions that discourage workers from pursuing internal promotion opportunities.