Experiments on Employer-Employee Relationships

Abstract

Employer-employee relationships exist commonly in workplaces and are important for people to understand the interactions between employers and employees and also their own behavior. This dissertation presents studies of different aspects of employer-employee relationships using laboratory experiments. Chapter 1 studies how the problematic nature of many middle management positions drive middle managers to interact with their employees in a negative way in workplaces, as they are under pressure from upper management to extract high effort from their employees, but given few incentives to do so. Chapter 2 focuses on the potential peer effects of employees\u27 performance feedback and performance. My current data suggests that there is no overall treatment effect of peer workers\u27 performance feedback or performance on employees\u27 effort choices, but a positive correlation between coworkers\u27 efforts and employees\u27 efforts is found and indicates the peer effects of performance can potentially exist, which echos the results from a number of studies about peer effects. Chapter 3 examines if females and minorities have reduced willingness to participate in tasks with more subjective judgment. My data provides suggestive but not significant results to support my hypotheses that correlations between subjects\u27 avoidance to subjective judgment and their genders, ethnicities, or demographic information being accessible to the judge exist. Correlations between subjects\u27 changes of avoidance to judgment and their genders or ethnicities are found insignificant as well