Understanding organisations - The complex interplay of incentives and identity

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Guido Friebel
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2009 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 157211623

We suggest to investigate theoretically and empirically the interaction of material incentives with the concern of people for identity and status in organizations. We thus respond to the recent criticism brought fon/vard by experimental economists and psychologists that Incentive theory implies too narrow sources of motivation. However, rather than rejecting the incentive paradigm, our intention is to enhance the paradigm by behavioural assumptions: status and identity appear among the foremost additional sources of organizational behaviour, but compared to other forces, for instance, fairness, they are relatively under-researched.The main goals of our common research programme are:A) To enhance formal incentive-based theories of organizations and labor relations by explicitly taking into account identity and status concernsB) To measure the interactions between identity and status on one side, and the design of incentives and other organizational policies on the other side, through experiments and field data workC) To refine the partial analysis of organizations by studies that explicitly take into account the embeddedness of organizations in markets and the societyThe Toulouse and Goethe Groups are well suited for such a programme. They bring together researchers in economics and management who are connected by a common interest in the theory of organizations and incentive theory, labor relations, experimental economics and economic psychology. Both groups have a strong research record in those fields. Both teams build their work on formal theories, experimental studies and field data. Both locations have their own laboratory and staff, and the know how to generate and analyze field data sets. The collaboration will be facilitated by the fact that there are long-standing collaborations between members of the two groups.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Participating Person: Professorin Dr. Roberta Dessi