Publications
The chief human resource officer in the C-suite: Peer prevalence and environmental uncertainty. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, forthcoming. [link]
Co-authors: David Bendig, Kathrin Haubner and Jonathan Hoke
The chief human resource officer (CHRO) role elevates people-related matters to the apex of the firm. Why do some companies’ leading management teams place so much emphasis on human resources while others do not? The present study argues that CHROs’ presence in the C-suite is driven by firms’ imitation of industry peers’ leadership structures as a response to uncertainty. The investigation also sheds light on the moderating role of environmental factors that can influence mimetic isomorphism in HR leadership. Through a longitudinal analysis of firms listed on the U.S. Standard & Poor’s 500 index between 2006 and 2020, the study shows a positive relationship between the prevalence of the CHRO position among firms’ peers and a focal firm having a CHRO in its top management. The results demonstrate that certain types of uncertainty serve as boundary conditions for such copying actions: Industry growth strengthens mimicking behavior while industry volatility weakens it. There is no clear evidence for the moderating role of industry competition. The findings contribute a neo-institutional view of human resource structures in the top management and strengthen the bond between the strategy and human resource literature.
Are rural firms left behind? Firm location and perceived job attractiveness of high-skilled workers. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 17(1), 2024, 75-86. [link]
Co-author: Matthias Brachert
We conduct a discrete choice experiment to investigate how the location of a firm in a rural or urban region affects the perceived job attractiveness for university students and graduates and, therewith, contributes to the rural-urban divide. We characterize the attractiveness of a location based on several dimensions (social life, public infrastructure, connectivity) and combine this information with an urban or rural attribution. We also vary job design and contractual characteristics of the job. We find that job offers from companies in rural areas are generally considered less attractive. This is true regardless of the attractiveness of the region. The negative perception is particularly pronounced among persons with urban origin and singles. These persons rate job offers from rural regions significantly worse. In contrast, for individuals with partners and kids this preference is less pronounced. High-skilled individuals who originate from rural areas have no specific regional preference at all.
For a summary in German language, see Wirtschaft im Wandel.
Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs. Huber et al. 2023, PNAS, 120(23), e2215572120. [link]
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
How Community Managers Affect Online Idea Crowdsourcing Activities. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 24(1), 2023, 222-248. [link]
Co-author: Lars Hornuf
In this study, we investigate whether and to what extent community managers in online collaborative communities can stimulate community activities through their engagement. Using a novel data set of 22 large online idea crowdsourcing campaigns, we find that moderate but steady manager activities are an adequate measure to enhance community participation. Moreover, we evidence that appreciation, motivation, and intellectual stimulation by managers are positively associated with community participation, but the effectiveness of these communication strategies depends on the form of participation which community managers would like to encourage. Finally, the data reveal that community manager activities that require more effort, such as media file uploads instead of simple written comments, have a larger effect on community participation.
Mission, Motivation, and the Active Decision to Work for a Social Cause. Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 51(2), 2022, 260-278. [link]
Co-author: Vanessa Mertins
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 pro-social 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 pro-social 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.
Gift-Exchange in Society and the Social Integration of Refugees: Evidence from a Survey, a Laboratory, and a Field Experiment. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 192, 2021, 482-499. [link]
Co-authors: Bernd Josef Leisen and Vanessa Mertins
Refugee integration requires broad support from the host society, but only a minority is actively engaged. Given that most individuals reciprocate kind behavior, we examine the idea that the proportion of supporters will increase as a reciprocal response to refugees’ contributions to society through volunteering. Our nationwide survey experiment shows that citizens’ intentions to contribute time and money rise significantly when they learn about refugees’ pro-social activities. However, we find a substantial heterogeneity in the observed treatment effects. Individuals with a high reciprocal inclination show higher willingness to contribute time, while individuals with a lower reciprocal inclination are ready to contribute money after learning about the refugees' good deeds. Information regarding the possibility to establish a mutual support relationship with the refugees does not generally increase the willingness to contribute time or money beyond the information on refugees’ general contributions to the society. We complement this investigation with experiments in the lab and the field that confirm our findings for actual behavior.
For a summary in German language, see Wirtschaft im Wandel.
"The good news about bad news": Feedback about past organizational failure and its impact on worker productivity. The Leadership Quarterly, 32(3), 2021, 101500. [link]
Co-authors: Vanessa Mertins and Michael Vlassopoulos
Failure in organizations is very common. Little is known about whether leaders should provide information about past organizational failure to followers and how this might affect their future performance. We conducted a field experiment in which we recruited temporary workers to carry out a phone campaign to attract new volunteers and randomly assigned them to either receive or not to receive information about a failed mail campaign pursuing the same goal. We find that informed workers performed better, regardless of whether they had previously worked on the failed mail campaign or not. Evidence from a second field experiment with students asked to support voluntarily a campaign for reducing food waste corroborates the finding. We explore the role of leadership tactics behind our findings in a third online survey experiment. We conclude that information about past failure is unlikely to have a negative impact on work performance, and might even lead to performance improvement. Implications for future research on the relevance of leadership tactics when giving such information are discussed.
Press coverage: The Sydney Morning Herald, Psychology Today
Unethical Employee Behavior Against Coworkers Following Unkind Management Treatment: An Experimental Analysis. Managerial and Decision Economics, 42(5), 2021, 1220-1234. [link]
Co-author: Joschka Waibel
We study unethical behavior towards unrelated coworkers as a response to managerial unkindness with two experiments. In our lab experiment, we do not find that subjects who experienced unkindness are more likely to cheat in a subsequent competition against another coworker who simultaneously experienced mistreatment. A subsequent survey experiment suggests that behavior in the lab can be explained by individuals’ preferences for norm adherence, since unkind management behavior does not alter the perceived moral appropriateness of cheating. However, having no shared experience of managerial unkindness opens up some moral wiggle room for employees to misbehave at the costs of others.
Paid Vacation Use: The Role of Works Councils. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 42(3), 2021, 473-503. [link] German summary available in Böckler Impuls No. 09/2016. [link]
Co-author: Laszlo Goerke
We investigate the relationship between co-determination at the plant level and paid vacation in Germany. From a legal perspective, works councils have no impact on vacation entitlements, but they can affect their use. Employing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we find that male employees who work in an establishment, in which a works council exists, take almost two additional days of paid vacation annually, relative to employees in an establishment without such institution. The effect for females is much smaller, if discernible at all. The data suggests that this gender gap might be due to the fact that women exploit vacation entitlements more comprehensively than men already in the absence of a works council.
Measuring the Indirect Effects of Adverse Employer Behavior on Worker Productivity – A Field Experiment. The Economic Journal, 130(632), 2020, 2546-2568. [link]
Co-authors: Matthias Heinz, Vanessa Mertins, Heiner Schumacher and Matthias Sutter
We 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-center. In our main treatment, we lay off some workers before the second shift. Compared to two control treatments, we find that the layoff 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 behavior. The latter interpretation is confirmed in a prediction experiment with professional HR managers. Our results suggest that the price for adverse employer behavior goes well beyond the potential tit-for-tat of directly affected workers.
Press coverage: Wirtschaftswoche, FAZ, Die Welt, and Impulse.de (all in German)
See also the column on VoxEU.org and a German summary in Wirtschaft im Wandel.
Gender Stereotypes Still in Mind: Information on Relative Performance and Competition Entry. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 82, 2019, 101448. [link]
By providing information on relative performance of the two genders before choosing between a piece rate and a tournament compensation scheme, I test whether the gender tournament gap diminishes in its size since individuals’ entry decisions seem to be driven not only by incorrect self-assessments in general but also by incorrect stereotypical beliefs about the genders’ average abilities. Indeed, the gender tournament gap shrinks sizeably, it even becomes statistically insignificant. Overconfident men opt less often for the tournament and, thereby, increase their expected payoff. To the contrary, highly conscientious women choose more often to compete even though they would have been better off with the piece rate compensation. Hence, the overall share of payoff maximizing choices remains unaffected.
Wage Delegation in the Field. Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 28, 2019, 656-669. [link]
Co-author: Vanessa Mertins
By conducting a natural field experiment, we analyze the managerial policy of delegating the wage choice to employees. We find that this policy enhances performance significantly, which is remarkable since allocated wage premiums of the same size have no effect at all. Observed self-imposed wage restraints and absence of negative peer effects speak in favor of wage delegation, although the chosen wage premium levels severely dampen its net value. Additional experimental and survey data provides important insights into employees' underlying motivation.
When the Meaning of Work Has Disappeared: Experimental Evidence on Employees' Performance and Emotions. Management Science 63(6), 2017, 1696-1707. [link]
Co-authors: Adrian Chadi and Vanessa Mertins
This experiment tests for a causal relationship between the meaning of work and employees’ motivation to perform well. The study builds on an existing employer–employee relationship, adding realism to the ongoing research of task meaning. Owing to an unexpected project cancelation, we are able to study how varying the information provided about the meaning of previously conducted work—without the use of deception, but still maintaining a high level of control—affects subsequent performance. We observe a strong decline in exerted effort when we inform workers about the meaninglessness of a job already done. Our data also suggests that providing a supplemental alternative meaning perfectly compensates for this negative performance effect. Individual characteristics such as reciprocal inclinations and trust prompt different reactions. The data also show that the meaning of work affects workers’ emotions, but we cannot establish a clear relationship between emotional responses and performance.
Press coverage: F.A.Z. (in German)
See also the LSE Business Review blog post [link] and a short version of the article in Wirtschaft im Wandel 3/2017 (in German) [link].
Trade union membership and paid vacation in Germany. IZA Journal of Labor Economics 4:17, 2015. [link]
Co-authors: Laszlo Goerke and Markus Pannenberg
In Germany, dependent employees take almost 30 days of paid vacation annually. We enquire whether an individual’s trade union membership affects the duration of vacation. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the period 1985 to 2010 and employing pooled OLS-estimators, we find that being a union member goes along with almost one additional day of vacation per year. Estimations exploiting the panel structure of our data suggest that a smaller part of this vacation differential can be due to the union membership status, while self-selection effects play a more important role.