How Does Workers‘ Trustworthiness Influence Their Reaction to Incentives?

Florian Englmaier

Employers and human resource managers in all sectors face the challenge of first selecting “good” employees and, once employed, motivating them to strive. As the paper presented in this video exhibits, the two tasks are closely connected: The laboratory experiment showed that workers’ “trustworthiness”, has a strong positive impact on their inclination to return wage-gifts by working harder. Hence employers would benefit from selecting workers not only according to their abilities but also according to “trustworthiness”, FLORIAN ENGLMAIER explains.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21036/LTPUB10081

Researcher

Florian Englmaier is Professor of Organizational Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich. Englmaier spent some years as a visiting scholar at various prestigious institutions, such as the University College London, Stanford University, and Harvard Business School. Englmaier’s primary research interests are in organizational economics, industrial organization, and contract theory. For this research he was named Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the Organizations Research Group, funded by the LMU’s excellence fund. Englmaier investigates the nature of relationships and contracts between employers and workers, and how this may be influenced by a worker’s ‘trustworthiness’.

Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

"LMU Munich is one of the leading universities in Europe. Carrying on a tradition that goes back over 500 years, LMU offers challenging study programs and provides an ideal environment for top-level research. "Introducing LMU" gives an insight into learning and teaching as well as research and life at LMU." ( Source )

Original Publication

Worker Characteristics and Wage Differentials: Evidence from a Gift-Exchange Experiment

Florian Englmaier

Sebastian Strasser

Joachim Winter

Published in 2013