Hard workers '˜also drive colleagues' productivity'

Hard workers can improve colleagues' productivity, say researchers

A team from York University found that in low-skilled occupations an increase of 10 per cent in the average performance of co-workers raised wages by almost one per cent and concluded that the effect was most likely driven by increased productivity because of pressure to keep up.

Dr Thomas Cornelissen, a researcher in the department of economics at the university, said: “We would expect that some positive practices would ‘rub-off’ on co-workers, and in fact we knew from previous research that such effects exist for specific occupations.

“For example, a US study showed that supermarket cashiers scanned shopping items faster when they worked the same shifts as fast-working employees.

“Our research showed that this effect was not unique to shop workers, but is applicable across many low-skilled jobs, such as waiters, warehouse workers, and agricultural assistants.

“Moreover, our results show that improvements in performance due to co-worker quality raise a workers wages, something that hadn’t previously been analysed.” But staff tended to slip backwards after a “good worker” had left a company, suggesting that the productivity effect is due to peer-pressure, which lessens when a good worker leaves and could cause productivity and wages to stagnate.

But the same rule did not apply, the report said, to high skilled occupations such as lawyers, doctors and architects. They thought this may have been because it was not as easy to observe the working practices of other colleagues in that type of role.

The team suggested there may be less social pressure in high-skilled occupations compared to low-skilled.

Dr Cornelissen added: “There are many challenges to conducting this type of work, such as the structure of the company, how to accurately establish cause and effect between co-workers, and finding a measure of good and poor performance.

“The more work we can do analysing data from across the labour market, the more likely we will start to see common trends.”

Researchers looked at the wage records for millions of workers and all of their co-workers over a period of 15 years across 330 professions in a large metropolitan area of Germany.