Contributions published at Management Nonprofit-Organisation (Agnes Bäker)

The leadership literature shows consistent, sizeable, and persistent effects indicating that female leaders face significant biases in the workplace compared with male leaders. However, the social identity leadership literature suggests these biases might be overcome at the team level by adjusting the number of women in the team. Building on this work, we conducted 2 multiple source, multiple wave, multi-level randomized field experiments to test if the gender composition of teams helps to restore equity in leadership evaluations of men and women. Across two samples of university students engaged in a team-building exercise, we find that male leaders are rated as more prototypical leaders than female leaders despite no differences in leaders’ self-reported prototypicality; however, this male leadership advantage is eliminated in gender- balanced teams. In Study 2, we extend this finding by supporting a moderated mediation model showing that leader gender and the team’s gender composition interact to relate to perceived trust in the leader, through the mediating mechanism of leader prototypicality. Findings support the social identity model of organizational leadership and indicate a boundary condition of role congruity theory, bolstering our need for a more social relational, context-based approach to leadership.

We analyze the factors that drive an individual’s self-selection decision between (1) working individually and being paid for individual performance and (2) working on a team and being paid for team performance. While the literature has focused on task specific ability as a self-selection criterion, we also investigate the effects of teamwork skills, expectations concerning the task specific ability and teamwork skills of potential teammates, and task type. Thus we account for multidimensional sorting. Considering these additional factors might explain the empirical puzzle that some studies have found a positive relation between an individual’s task specific skills and the propensity to join a team, and others found a negative relation. Confronting our predictions with data from a real-effort pen-and-paper experiment, we find that the less able are attracted by teamwork and team incentives but that teamwork skills and expectations concerning the ability of potential teammates might in fact compensate for this adverse self-selection effect. Regarding task type we find that teamwork is more attractive, if the task offers a high potential for complementarities between team members.

Agnes Bäker and Amanda Goodall have found that academics who are happiest at work have a head of department who is a distinguished researcher. How can such people be encouraged into management?

In three-person envy games, an allocator, a responder, and a dummy player interact. Since agreement payoffs of responder and dummy are exogenously given, there is no tradeoff between allocator payoff and the payoffs of responder and dummy. Rather, the allocator chooses the size of the pie and thus—being the residual claimant—defines his own payoff. While in the dictator variant of the envy game, responder and dummy can only refuse their own shares, in the ultimatum variant, the responder can accept or reject the allocator’s choice with rejection leading to zero payoffs for all three players. Comparing symmetric and asymmetric agreement payoffs for responder and dummy shows that equality concerns are significantly context-dependent: allocators are willing to leave more money on the table when universal equality can be achieved than when only partial equality is at stake. Similarly, equality seeking of responders is most prominent when universal equality is possible.

Over the last two decades, the percentage of job advertisements requiring teamwork skills has greatly increased. However, the effects of requiring teamwork skills on the applicant pool are not yet clear. Addressing this research gap, this article makes use of original data from an online survey applying conjoint design. The survey evidence points to (a) effectively induced self-selection with respect to teamwork skills, but also (b) an adverse effect of requiring teamwork skills on the task-related skills of the applicants. More specifically, requiring teamwork skills in job advertisements resulted in potential employees with higher teamwork skills, ceteris paribus, applying with a significantly higher probability. However, it also resulted in potential employees with higher task-related skills, ceteris paribus, applying with a significantly lower probability. Considering that organizations always need employees with high task-related skills, but that they may not always need team players, they should carefully consider when the requirement for teamwork skills is listed in their job advertisements—because there is a downside to looking for team players.

To succeed in academia, non-tenured researchers aim to maximize their quality-adjusted research output. This paper analyzes if and how changing institutional affiliations as a non-tenured post-doctoral researcher influences publications, and how potential effects depend on the context of the researcher. Theoretically, moving to another university at another place can have positive and negative effects on career success. On the one hand when moving to another institution one stands to gain knowledge (human capital), colleagues and coauthors (social capital). On the other hand part of one's knowledge might no longer be relevant and contacts to colleagues and even coauthors might be lost. In line with the latter arguments, matching analysis of an extensive dataset of German-speaking economists and management researchers reveals a short-term negative effect on publications across contexts. Examining the researchers’ contexts reveals that this negative effect of mobility seems to be driven by researchers with social capital (i.e. coauthors or colleagues) tied to the doctorate granting institution.

When randomly assigning participants to experimental roles and the according payment prospects, participants seem to receive “manna from heaven.” In our view, this seriously questions the validity of laboratory findings. We depart from this by auctioning off player roles via the incentive compatible random price mechanism thus avoiding the selection effect of competitive second price auctions. Our experiment employs the generosity game where the proposer chooses the size of the pie, facing an exogenously given own agreement payoff, and the responder is the residual claimant. We find that entitlement crowds out equality seeking and strengthens efficiency seeking. More generally, we find that inducing entitlement for the roles in which participants find themselves makes a difference. Interpreting participants’ willingness to pay for their role as their aspiration level further allows to test satisficing and explore “mutual satisficing.” We find that responder participants apparently do not anticipate proposer generosity in aspiration formation.

Incentive schemes not only influence the effort provision of workers, but might also induce sorting. As drivers of self-selection, the literature mainly focuses on measures of productivity; however, other variables, such as preferences, beliefs and personality, also play a role. With this paper, we contribute to the literature on drivers of self-selection by analyzing the role of perceived wage risks as potential influences on the sorting decision. To this end, we study a sorting decision between two variable compensation systems, where both options carry wage risks. Specifically, we look at sorting between individual piece rates and team piece rates. Using experimental data, we find evidence for both risk diversification considerations and free-riding concerns (i.e., risk of teaming-up with low-productive teammates) as drivers of self-selection. However, our data does not support the concern of our experimental subjects that others actually reduce their effort when working under team compensation, as compared to individual-based compensation.

Innovation economics is usually neglecting the psychological tradition of creativity research. Our study is an attempt to experimentally collect behavioral data revealing in how far characteristics like creativity, analytical skills and personality traits on the one hand and innovative capability, the topic of innovation economics, on the other hand are interrelated. We find that participants' performance in innovation games is related to their creativity, analytical skills and risk tolerance. Personality traits such as participants' anxiety, independence, toughmindedness or extraversion at best play a minor role.

In our paper, we analyze the interplay of contestant heterogeneity and idiosyncratic risk in rank-order tournaments: While in symmetric tournaments an increase in idiosyncratic risk reduces incentives, in asymmetric tournaments this is not necessarily the case: Rather, we show that increasing the level of idiosyncratic risk in asymmetric tournaments will at first increase and - only after a critical risk level has been reached - reduce incentives. We find this critical risk level to be higher, the larger the degree of contestant heterogeneity. Concerning practical implications, it is more important to reduce idiosyncratic risk in the tournament when contestants are similar and less beneficial when contestants are heterogeneous. In light of the fact that equilibrium effort levels in tournaments with a low level of contestant heterogeneity are by far higher than those in tournaments with high levels of contestant heterogeneity, the advice would be to simultaneously reduce contestant heterogeneity (e.g., by league-building or handicapping) and idiosyncratic risk.

It is widely acknowledged that derbies between two teams from the same city or region catch more public attention than “normal” soccer matches. Terms such as “Old Firm” (Rangers vs. Celtic), “Merseyside” (Liverpool FC vs. Everton FC), “Supercla´ sico” (Boca Juniors vs. River Plate), and “Revierderby” (Dortmund vs. Schalke) are well-known even to people outside their respective countries of origin. Using data from the German Bundesliga from 1999 to 2009, we test whether derbies differ from other soccer matches with respect to the number of goals scored by each team, match results, and referee evaluations. The results are very surprising given the enormous amount of public attention that derbies with their special character attract: we find that there are no significant differences between derbies and “normal” matches. Despite the importance of derbies for fans and the public, they turn out to be “normal” soccer matches in all other respects.

A popular soccer myth states that teams affected by a sending-off perform better than they would have performed without it. Based on economic theory, the authors analyze the course of soccer matches using data from the German Bundesliga from 1999 to 2009. The results show that sending-offs against home teams have a negative impact on their performance. However, for guest teams, the impact depends on the time remaining after the sending-off and can be positive if the sending-off occurs late in the game. Thus, the “ten do it better” myth seems to hold for guest teams to a certain extent.

In two-person generosity games, the proposer’s agreement payoff is exogenously given, whereas that of the responder is endogenously determined by the proposer’s choice of the pie size. In three-person generosity games, equal agreement payoffs for two of the players are either exogenously excluded or imposed. We predict that the latter crowds out - or at least weakens - efficiency seeking. Our treatments rely on a 2x3 factorial design, differing in whether the responder or the third (dummy) player is the residual claimant and whether the proposer’s agreement payoff is larger, equal, or smaller than the other exogenously given agreement payoff.