The Role of the Decision-Making Regime on Cooperation in a Workgroup Social Dilemma: An Examination of Cyberloafing

Games

Brice Corgnet¹  Roberto Hernán-González³  Matthew W. McCarter² 

[1] Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University, 1 University Drive, Orange, CA 92866, USA; E-Mail:;College of Business, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1 UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA;Business School, Nottingham University, Jubilee Campus, Nottingham, NG8 1BB, UK; E-Mail:

关键词: autocratic decision-making;    cyberloafing;    group voting;    social dilemma;    workgroup performance;   

DOI  :  10.3390/g6040588

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

A burgeoning problem facing organizations is the loss of workgroup productivity due to cyberloafing. The current paper examines how changes in the decision-making rights about what workgroup members can do on the job affect cyberloafing and subsequent work productivity. We compare two different types of decision-making regimes: autocratic decision-making and group voting. Using a laboratory experiment to simulate a data-entry organization, we find that, while autocratic decision-making and group voting regimes both curtail cyberloafing (by over 50%), it is only in group voting that there is a substantive improvement (of 38%) in a cyberloafer’s subsequent work performance. Unlike autocratic decision-making, group voting leads to workgroups outperforming the control condition where cyberloafing could not be stopped. Additionally, only in the group voting regime did production levels of cyberloafers and non-loafers converge over time.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.