Some companies go to great lengths to monitor their workers to discourage stealing and other bad behavior. While monitoring may weed out scofflaws, it may also have a deleterious effect on the morale and motivation of other employees. Therein lies the dilemma, according to the authors of a March 2002 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Economic Review.The paper,“Monitoring, Motivation and Management: The Determinants of Opportunistic Behavior in a Field Experiment,” reports on a study involving 768 employees of a U.S. telemarketing company, each of whom was asked to phone potential donors to request contributions for a nonprofit organization. To prevent the callers from inflating donation figures, managers later contacted a fraction of the donors to confirm their pledges. Although employees received bonuses for exceeding pledge targets, each week the company deducted “bad calls” (unconfirmed pledges) from bonus totals. During the study, the number of bad calls reported to employees was manipulated to make the degree of monitoring appear to be less than it actually was.
