Download or read book Discretionary Bonus Pools and Employees' Influence Activities written by Florian Elsinger and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study experimentally investigates how the extent of superior discretion over the allocation of a bonus pool affects the output of a team when employees can engage in unproductive influence activities. Granting superiors high discretion allows them to use non-verifiable information and observations in order to mitigate free-rider incentives in teams. Prior research, however, also suggests that discretion may give rise to unproductive influence activities of employees. The question, therefore, is whether organizations should reduce superiors' discretion extent in order to mitigate influence activities in teams. Conventional economic theory assumes that superiors optimally account for influence activities in bonus decisions if they have incentives to do so. Reducing the discretion extent therefore harms superiors' flexibility and may impair the efficiency of discretionary bonus pools. Relying on behavioral theory, however, I argue that superiors likely overweight their personal information in bonus decisions. This increases incentives for employees to engage in influence activities under high discretion and detracts them from contributing to team output. I thus predict that reducing superiors' discretion extent actually increases team output. Furthermore, I predict and show that the degree of mutual monitoring between peers amplifies the positive effect of reducing superiors' discretion extent. The reason is that influence activities of peers are more salient under a high degree of monitoring and thereby affect behavior and fairness perceptions of employees more strongly. Reducing the discretion extent therefore becomes particularly important with higher degrees of mutual monitoring. This study contributes to the literature on discretionary bonus pools by providing evidence on the failure of superiors to sufficiently account for influence activities in bonus decisions and, thus, on the benefits of limiting superiors' discretion extent.