Improving Performance in Work Groups: The Role of Joint Tasks, Financial Incentives, and Social Interaction

We report the results from an experiment that examines how and when joint tasks and financial incentive structures promote group performance on an objective task. The purpose is to identify behavioral mechanisms produced by these factors that link structural interdependencies to task accuracy. The context is a cooperative four-person group that seeks to resolve a collective problem (i.e., find a solution to a survival task). The experiment manipulates task jointness and group-based incentives. Subjects freely interacted in their assigned groups over a 10-minute period, and three behavioral mechanisms were derived from the coding of their interaction: nonverbal synchronization (eye contact, body orientation, task focus), evaluative engagement (statements of agreement and disagreement), and external (observers) assessments of the group's cohesion. The results indicate that (1) task jointness is a stronger predictor of group performance than the group incentive structure, (2) nonverbal synchronization and the frequency of evaluative engagement mediate the effect of task jointness, and (3) the assessments of group's cohesion reveal a negative impact on group performance. This study finds that task jointness is more important to task performance (accuracy) than collective incentives because of the interaction patterns unleashed by joint tasks.