UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome Professor Giada Di Stefano, Bocconi, to host a research seminar discussing ‘Left behind? Effort-enhancing norms, collaboration and learning in teams with heterogeneous performance levels’.

Abstract

Prior work shows that, when teams are composed of members with heterogeneous performance levels, less performing members do not benefit from peer learning, but rather tend to be left behind. In this paper we ask: Is there any way that managers can counteract this tendency and ignite peer effects in these teams? We approach this question by leveraging the unique empirical opportunity of studying an organization whose members are periodically and randomly allocated to work together in teams characterized by varying performance levels. We explore how favoring the emergence of an effort-enhancing norm, by emphasizing the extent to which an organization values and rewards individual effort, can influence the propensity of team members, particularly the less performing ones, to interact with one another and, as a result, learn from working with better performing teammates. We design and implement an intervention aimed at manipulating our variable of interest and observe the effect of this intervention on teamwork and individual learning. We then rely on results from two online experiments to more directly test our intuitions about the potential mechanisms underlying our findings. Our results suggest that providing access to highly talented peers is not in itself sufficient to spur learning across peers with heterogeneous performance levels: rather, it is crucial to incentivize the less performing members to pursue the associated learning opportunities.