Can self selection create high-performing teams?

Friendship and Female Education: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Bangladeshi Primary Schools

“…Using the distribution of the IPEMT for the whole sample, we define low-ability students as those below the median value, whereas high-ability students are those above the median value. 17 The results reveal that, for male students, there was no effect of studying with friends rather than peers on the change in math test scores. In contrast, there was a large and positive gain in math scores for low-ability female students who studied in friendship groups, compared to those studying in peer groups.…”

Relative Performance Feedback to Teams

“…4 Hence, the reduction in performance in their study is likely to be driven by a factor not present in our study. Moreover, in a recent field experiment by Chen and Gong (2018) , it has been shown that teams formed endogenously exerted higher effort than exogenously formed teams. This supports the idea that social ties within an endogenously formed team affect effort per se.…”

Why Join a Team?

“…Empirical tests of team formation and team incentives remain scarce (Lazear and Shaw, 2007;List and Rasul, 2011;Charness and Kuhn, 2011). While the empirical literature has investigated extensively cooperation and free-riding in groups (see surveys by Chaudhuri, 2011, andVilleval, 2020) and more recently the dynamics of group composition (e.g., Bandiera et al, 2013;Chen and Gong, 2018, in the context of teamwork; Ahn et al, 2008;Charness and Yang, 2014, in the context of public good games), very few papers have explored selection into team-based compensation. The influential paper of Hamilton et al (2003) studies a garment company switching from individual piece rates to a form of revenue sharing teams.…”

“…Also, letting employees choose whether to work in a team may reinforce social identity and cohesion, enhancing the benefits of teams. Experiments have shown the benefits of self-selection and decentralized team formation for the profits of firms employing cooperative workers (Kosfeld and von Siemens, 2009), for coordination in weak-link games (Chen, 2017), on productivity in study teams (Chen and Gong, 2018), and for online crowdsourcing teams (Blasco et al, 2013).…”