Leadership and team culture in a competitive environment.

Last registered on December 06, 2018

View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Leadership and team culture in a competitive environment.

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0003639

Initial registration date

December 04, 2018

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

December 06, 2018, 8:52 AM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country

Argentina

Region

Latin America

Primary Investigator

Name

F. Asis Martinez-Jerez

Affiliation

Cornell University

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status

On going

Start date

2014-08-04

End date

2019-06-30

Keywords

Firms & Productivity, Governance, Labor

Additional Keywords

Tournaments, Teams, Leadership, Culture

JEL code(s)

M52; M12

Secondary IDs

Abstract

This trial investigates the effect of leader incentives on the performance of teams. In collaboration with a medium-sized Latin-American bank, we engineered a field experiment by designing a series of contests among the bank branches, in which we varied the prize structure of the tournaments (in some tournaments, the prizes were shared among all branch employees, while in other tournaments there was an additional prize for the branch manager).

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Martinez-Jerez, F. Asis. 2018. "Leadership and team culture in a competitive environment.." AEA RCT Registry. December 06. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.3639-1.0

Former Citation

Martinez-Jerez, F. Asis. 2018. "Leadership and team culture in a competitive environment.." AEA RCT Registry. December 06. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/3639/history/38456

Sponsors & Partners

Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

Intervention Start Date

2014-09-01

Intervention End Date

2014-12-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

Sales performance.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

In collaboration with a medium-sized Latin-American bank, we engineered a field experiment by designing a series of contests among the bank branches, in which we varied the prize structure of the tournaments (in some tournaments, the prizes were shared among all branch employees, while in other tournaments there was an additional prize for the branch manager).

Experimental Design Details

From September to December of 2014, each of the 177 branches of the bank competed in four monthly tournaments. Each month, the branches were randomly allocated to one of seven tournaments of about 25 branches each. At the beginning of each month, the allocation, as well as the structure of prizes for the month and other rules of the contest, were announced to the entire branch network through the bank’s intranet. At the end of the month, the top three branches in each tournament received a prize to be shared among all branch employees.
Throughout the four months, branch employees participated in the tournament, but were unaware that the tournaments were part of a field experiment.
We use a within-subject field experiment where the factors are leader bonus and leadership style. Leader bonus is an exogenously manipulated factor that refers to the presence or absence of an additional bonus to the team leader, and leadership style is a measured factor that refers to the transactional versus transformational style of the leader.
We implemented the leader bonus manipulation as an exogenous change where an individual prize was awarded to the leader of the winning branches during two of the tournament months: October and December. We selected the months with a leader bonus randomly.

Randomization Method

Both randomizations were done in the office by a computer.

Randomization Unit

For the tournament groups the unit of randomization was the branch.
For the leadership additional bonus the unit of randomization was each combination of four months with two pairs of treated and untreated months.

Was the treatment clustered?

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

177 branches

Sample size: planned number of observations

708 branch-month observations (177 branches times four months)

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

354 branch-month observations for tournaments with a bonus for the leader and 354 branch-month observations for tournaments without a bonus for the leader (177 branches times two months for each treatment)

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB