How Individual Performance Incentives Impact Network, Content, and Utilization of Shared Knowledge: Evidence from Digital Trace Data | WIP Seminar with Sae-Seul Park

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Meeting ID: 884 5422 8450

Abstract: Knowledge sharing among employees is a crucial component of intra-organizational knowledge transfer and performance in knowledge-intensive work. I investigate a common form of compensation that would be expected to impede knowledge sharing—individual pay-for-performance (PFP)—and introduce a theoretical framework arguing that such incentives change not only quantitative levels but also qualitative characteristics of informal knowledge sharing. Under individual PFP, engaging in helping behaviors such as knowledge sharing is costly because agents are incentivized to expend efforts towards performance linked directly to financial rewards. I propose that while agents share less knowledge under individual PFP, they also change what knowledge they share with whom and whether they utilize shared knowledge, such that (1) knowledge sharing occurs mainly through reciprocal ties, (2) the content of shared knowledge is more likely to be task-focused, and (3) recipients are more likely to utilize the knowledge shared with them. Empirically, I use digital trace data from a private firm’s electronic information system, constructing unobtrusive behavioral measures of actualized knowledge-based interactions to analyze patterns and content of knowledge flows. I find causal identification by using econometric methods to exploit the subject firm’s shift from flat wages to individual PFP.

Sae-Seul Park is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School of Management. Her research examines strategic human capital through the lens of knowledge management, with an emphasis on understanding how the interplay of incentives and social relationships shapes knowledge and learning processes that underlie outcomes at both the individual and the organizational levels. Her work considers how individual-level human capital characteristics influence the drivers of performance by the collective human capital pool, focusing on the antecedents and consequences of intraorganizational knowledge transfer and human capital development.

Our CIRHR Work-In-Progress Seminar series allows members of our community to discuss early-stage research. Future guest speakers include:

• Decoding Token Women’s Dilemma: Gender differences in Peer Influence in Male-dominant Occupations
  January 31, Hyeun Lee, Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School of Management
   
• When do employers update their recruitment behavior based on interview outcomes?
  April 3, Santiago Campero, CIRHR Assistant Professor
   
• The Gender Wage Gap and Redistribution
  April 10, Kourtney Koebel, CIRHR Sessional Lecturer