Sunday, October 23, 2016
Team Production Benefit through Gift Exchange
The articles here are very interesting, especially the third one in regards to the power of altruism. I found it interesting to know that a study conducted revealed that for children, the propensity to help other reduces if they are rewarded with a gift. This shows the true nature of children, wherein people try to do good, or act ethically even without any monetary compensation. The example where the number of absence days given to firefighters being limited also shows a similar theme. When there was no penalty to their pay if they took a leave, people had an ethical reason, for the good of the society to not skip work and only take leave when actually sick. When this was changed to having their pay docked, people no longer took their work as a social good and instead only for monetary reasons. Thus during times of holiday, such as Christmas the number of sick leaves rose. This is due to people placing a dollar amount on their work done and during special times would rather take a pay cut. Such thinking over the years has reduced the altruistic nature of people and makes them more money orientated. Recently there has been a shift into moving to an altruistic way. Many companies have recently allowed people to work from home and take sick leaves without a pay cut. Contrary to what many people thought, the number of holidays taken actually reduced. This is because people had the ethic and self-motivation to work and contribute through team production even though they could have taken a holiday without any pay cut. The reason why people do this can is because they feel obligated, or motivated to do their work. People who work more will have better chances of an increased salary, promotion or bonus at the year end. Thus, the trick is to make acting for the greater good, ie team production should also be beneficial to the individual.
One of my classes which I am currently taking, BADM 395 encourages students to participate in a manner that promotes team production through gift exchange. Here, the teacher provides a question bank out of which questions in the midterm and final exams come from. It is difficult to solve each question on your own and then study, but as per the teacher's recommendation, if people collaborate then studying becomes easier. The professor told us that us that we can and should collaborate with our classmates to get the answer the questions. For proof that collaboration works, our professor told us that when students exchanged study material, the % of students who got A's increased. Compared to a year where there was to communication and collaboration between students and thus only one student managed to do well in the class and get an A, thus making it harder.
One example that I can think of regarding team production through gift exchange is that off getting rewards for referrals. There was this scheme for a product where a person got $100 dollars for providing the referral to another person who signs up to the service. The sign up cost $15 and took 5 minutes to complete. In such a setting, the person will not sign up or if he is newly signing up has no reason to use the referral code as he is not getting any value added. On the other hand, the other person also gets nothing since his referral code was not used. Here both parties are in losses. Similar to the article where the kids pull the strings to get candy and then divide it, here also there is value in team production. If the first person offers the other some incentive, such as $30 out of the $100 then the person would most likely use the referral code. Here through simple gift exchange, the production of both individuals increased.
Team production and effort can also be detrimental in certain situations when there is a share the spoils mentality as mentioned in the article titled, "How to get the rich to share the marbles". When there is group effort or collaboration, sometimes some people do not put in as much work. Their work will be done by the other people to make up as, in the end they all receive the same benefits. Thus innovation and extra effort will be stagnant. This is why modern workplace has incentives set up. If there is no incentive for doing better work or helping the poor, it will not happen. Thus the only way to get the rich to share the spoils and help the poor is to make it in their best interest to do so. Referring to the altruistic nature of humans, for some that is enough and thus people who are wealthy donate their wealth to charity and other organization for the benefit of others. For some people, thus feeling of altruism is lower and thus there should be incentives to stimulate them to help those in a lower position.
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Your strategy in writing this post was interesting in that you seemed to feel it necessary to have several examples, each of which you only touched on briefly. An alternative would be to have had only one example, but then go into that in greater depth. Why you did the one but not the other isn't entirely obvious to me, but I wonder if you trust the examples that you did come up with as to whether they illustrate the issues in these pieces.
ReplyDeleteLet me take on just the example of BADM 395 and the instructor giving out the questions in advance of the exam, where the students then know that the actual exam is a sampling from that question list. It would be good here for you to talk about the nature of team production. Let's say the team has two members, just to make that easier to describe. The teammates divide up the question list so each has to produce answers to half of the list. They then give the answers to their teammates. But the process shouldn't end there. Are the answers provided good and correct? How does one know? So the next step is for the teammate to evaluate the answer that was provided. There is an issue of whether such evaluation is easier to do than coming up with the answer originally. I don't know whether it is or it isn't. But, if it is a different sort of work, then there is more variety to the work than if one would do this as a solo effort. That variety might be why the learning seems to improve. However, there are other possible stories to tell about what is going on. You might have explored some of those and stuck just with this example for the post.
Yes, I think my examples regarding team production illustrate the issues provided in the essays aptly. I could have spoken in detail regarding only one example but felt there would be greater value in showing multiple examples and how they are all related to the topic of gift exchange though team production. It shows that such circumstances are more common and come across in everyday life more commonly than originally thought.
DeleteSpeaking in response to the BADM 395 class. Since the class is around 30 students and there were approximately 200 questions from the question pool, we decided to split the work evenly amongst all students. As in real life, we saw that although everyone knew this was the best way to move forward, it was not how it played out in the end. To begin with, there were some "leaders" in the class who took the initial effort to create a share able page with all the questions and then provide all class members with access. It was suggested that all people do around 6-7 questions and put their names in front of the question number they solved. This allowed for everyone to keep track of who has answered what questions and if it needed any correction or clarification, could ask that person.
When the work was finally being done, it was clear that some people did not contribute to the overall document. They did not want to be part of the team production and thus never saw or posted material. Some others did not contribute but still used the document to study from. There were some people who answered more than their fair share or what was required to. The motives of all these people are different, but it is clear that some people spent more time and effort for the overall good that others, but everyone benefitted equally. (they all had access to the same answer pool) Herein lies the problem of team production with such a gift exchange.
Such a method for collaboration is definitely easier as the individual work is reduced by a factor of the class size. And the quality of answers is also increased as all members provide their scrutiny and additional inputs if required. As this was a question pool to study from, and not a homework assignment.
I found your writing about how making firefighters pay for their sick days perpetuates the fact that there are monetary incentives to work to be interesting. In Inter-Macroeconomic Theory (ECON303 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) you learn about marginal rate of substitution between leisure (time spent not working) and consumption. What's interesting is that when we value our leisure time more than we value the amount of added consumption that the same amount of time at work can give us, we choose to not work.
ReplyDeleteWhen you gave the example of how there are more sick days around holidays made me think of this. As you say, it's probably the case that their job becomes dominated by monetary incentives with regards to work. When the monetary incentive is less than the personal value of leisure, then people will choose not to work (the firefighters will call in "sick").
I found your statement of how "team production should also be beneficial to the individual" to be an interesting topic. Naturally we work in teams to be more productive and gift exchanges are often reciprocated in some way. However, is it altruism to only help one another because we want something in return? Altruism calls for a rather selfless concern for others, which we all know is difficult for every human-being. I wonder if there is a balance between the intrinsic motivations and monetary motivations that would be most productive. Where people feel passion for what they do, yet still are partly driven by their rewards.