Collaboration, Workplace Practice Adoption, and Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Many performance-enhancing workplace practices require collaboration between managers and workers for successful adoption. However, managers and workers often have diverging incentives and misunderstandings regarding what needs to be done, impeding collaboration. We conduct a field experiment involving 12,761 small- and medium-sized firms, encouraging collaboration between owners/managers and workers on workplace safety. We find that the treatment increases safety training and reduces the rate and severity of accidents. Further, firms achieve these safety improvements without an increase in the number of workers. We explore heterogeneous treatment effects and find the following: At the managerial level, managers informed about safety yield stronger results; at the firm level, pre-existing intermediate levels of safety practices, low supervisory span of control, and low worker turnover enhance the effectiveness of the collaboration treatment; and at the environmental level, low market competition strengthens the treatment’s impact. Overall, we provide evidence on the importance of manager-worker collaboration and its contingencies for practice adoption and performance. This paper was accepted by Maria Guadalupe, business strategy. Funding: This work was supported by the Agencia Nacional de Investigacion y Desarrollo [Grant NC2024-021, M-NEW]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.08287 .