Incentives, burnout, and turnover: Dynamic compensation design with effort cost spillover

Abstract Employee burnout has long plagued firms. The prevalence of burnout shows that work-related effort is not only costly in the present but has carryover effects into the future. We incorporate this ‘effort cost spillover’ into a dynamic, two-period principal-agent model, where the worker’s effort cost in the second period increases in both their second-period and first-period efforts. We use this model to explore optimal compensation design and the connection between incentives, burnout, and turnover. Naturally, turnover may occur if it is easy to replace workers, or if firms fail to account for burnout when designing contracts. However, we show that even when turnover is very costly, and firms and workers properly understand effort cost spillover, the firm’s equilibrium strategy may be to offer high-powered incentives that induce workers to work so hard that they exit (i.e. reject any contract that the firm would offer) in the next period. Workplace measures that reduce spillover, such as flexible work arrangements, can limit turnover and improve profits dramatically. Committing to contracts for both periods in advance can also limit turnover (at the cost of reduced flexibility).