Sabotage in Corporate Contests – An Experimental Analysis

Abstract

In corporate contests, employees compete for a prize. Ideally, contests induce employees to exert productive effort which increases their probability of winning. In many environments, however, employees can also improve their own ranking position by harming their colleagues. Such negative incentive effects of corporate contests are largely unexplored, which can partly be attributed to the fact that sabotaging behavior is almost unobservable in the field. In this study we analyze behavior in experimental contests with heterogeneous players who are able to mutually sabotage each other. We find that sabotaging behavior systematically varies with the composition of different types of contestants. Moreover, if the saboteur’s identity is revealed sabotage decreases while retaliation motives prevail. Our results promise to be valuable when designing corporate contests.Bullying, Contest, Experiments, Sabotage, Tournament, C91, J33, J41, C72,

Does competition enhance performance or cheating? A laboratory experiment

“…12 Although we have a clear hypothesis we conduct a two-tailed test, because we observe some reduction in male cheating behaviour under competition that we do not want to systematically rule out. 13 The descriptive statistics show some reduction in the male propensity to cheat in the competitive treatment, even if not statistically significant. If we consider as cheating also when an individual indicates only one maze more than actually solved, than the sample mean for the frequency of cheating remains virtually constant for men in the two treatments, while women's frequency to cheat still increases under competition.…”

Rent-seeking versus productive activities in a multi-task experiment

“…Some recent papers test the well-known prediction of tournament theory that a larger prize spread not only induces more productive e¤ort, but also more destructive sabotage activities; see e.g. Harbring and Irlenbusch (2005) and Harbring et al (2004). In contrast to our setup, however, these experiments do not include a subsequent transfer stage.…”

Sabotage in Contests: A Survey

“…As sabotage can be understood as the opposite of help (because sabotage reduces another player's performance, whereas help increases it), their …ndings imply that sabotage is empirically relevant. This conclusion is con…rmed by numerous laboratory experiments (Harbring and Irlenbusch 2004, 2008Harbring et al 2007;Falk et al 2008;Vandegrift and Yavas 2010;Carpenter et al 2010;and Gürtler et al 2011), and …eld studies from sports (Balafoutas et al 2012;Brown and Chowdhury 2014;and Deutscher et al 2013). 6 Beviá and Corchón (2006) is an exception.…”

“…Laboratory experiments have found that contestants retaliate when sabotaged and that the threat of retaliation deters players from sabotaging others in the …rst place (Harbring et al 2007;Vandegrift and Yavas 2010). Retaliation thus acts as a type of additional indirect cost of sabotage.…”