Effective leadership across economic contexts

Cooper, David J., d'Adda, Giovanna and Weber, Roberto A. (2024) Effective leadership across economic contexts. The Leadership Quarterly, 35 (4). ISSN 1048-9843

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Abstract

We use a laboratory experiment to study how leaders affect workers’ productivity across economic incentive contexts. In four-person groups, three group members work on a production task, with a fourth member potentially serving as a leader. We vary the economic context by changing how worker pay is determined as a function of worker outputs, comparing Revenue Sharing, Weak Link or Tournament incentives while holding constant the activity performed by workers and the incentives for leaders. A second treatment varies whether groups have Active Leaders who can exert influence through messages to workers or Passive Supervisors who exert no influence. The average effect of having an Active Leader on group output is large only under Weak Link incentives. Across all incentive contexts, we find a positive correlation between the productivity increase in output produced by an Active Leader and independent ratings of leader quality based on measures from leadership research. The nature of leaders’ communication varies across incentive contexts, with comparisons between workers most common under Tournament incentives and messages about group earnings, which speak to social considerations, most common with Weak Link incentives.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data availability statement: Data will be made available on request. Funding information: Cooper is grateful for support from the National Science Foundation (award 1127704, “Leadership and overcoming coordination failure”). d’Adda is grateful for support from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (ERC grant agreement no. 336155—project COBHAM) and for support from the Fondazione Pesenti. Weber is grateful for support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (award 100018_140571, “Leadership across economic contexts”).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	leadership experiemnt
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Behavioural Economics Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	12 Feb 2025 09:30
Last Modified:	12 Feb 2025 20:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98455
DOI:	10.1016/j.leaqua.2024.101788

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