Work motivation and teams

This paper presents a novel technique to measure motivation for working on a task using deviations from the money-maximising benchmark in a real-effort experiment. Although we find that average output increases in response to team incentives and observation, we also find that workers with high intrinsic motivation do not respond to team incentives. The reason is that highly motivated workers already work hard, and team incentives are not strong enough to overcome the high cost of additional effort. • Our design allows to estimate optimal labour supply for money-maximisers. • We provide a measure for intrinsic work motivation. • Team incentives increase output in a real-efort task. • Workers with high intrinsic motivation do not respond to team incentives.