Working to benefit a good cause increases productivity by up to 30 per cent, according to the findings of a new study from the faculty of Social and Human Sciences.
When workers are given a social incentive such as a charitable donation linked to their job, performance increases by an average of 13 per cent, rising to 30 per cent amongst those who are initially the least productive.
“A lot of studies have shown how financial incentives, can improve performance,” says economist Dr Mirco Tonin, lead author of the study. “But our results provide empirical support for the growing recognition that some workers are also motivated by advancing social causes through their efforts.”
Students at the University took part in the study, which involved completing data entry sessions over the course of a week. Productivity was measured by the number of entries students made within the sessions and the accuracy of those entries.
Students received £20 for completing the sessions and were divided into groups, each with different levels of additional financial and social incentive. When participants could choose how much of their performance related pay they would like to share with a charity, and how much they wanted to keep for themselves, performance increased considerably. Those who chose to donate gave an average of 20 per cent of their per entry rate, with women being more generous than men.
“We find that offering subjects some discretion in choosing their own payment scheme leads to a substantial improvement in performance,” says Dr Tonin. “This suggests that firms willing to introduce corporate giving programmes may want to consider giving employees the opportunity to ‘opt in.’”
The study Corporate Philanthropy and Productivity: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment will be published in the forthcoming edition of Management Science.