Absence of Quantity-Quality Trade-Off in Performance Tournaments
RCTClinical Trial
Performance-based incentives and promotion tournaments tied to quantitative output metrics often induce multitasking distortions, leading workers to maximize volume while sacrificing service quality or cherry-picking easy targets.
Picture this
Imagine a taxi driver rewarded solely for the total number of trips made; if the evaluation system simultaneously tracks passenger satisfaction and trip duration, the driver cannot simply rush through micro-trips or ignore distant passengers to artificially inflate their trip count.
What the evidence says
Transitioning to meritocratic promotions increased average visit length by 15% (from 11.99 minutes baseline) and increased routine health visits by 30% (+1.084 visits; p < 0.05) without worsening household targeting or shifting visits disproportionately toward friends and family.
- Who was studied
- N = 2,009 Community Health Workers evaluated via random surveys across 10% of village primary female caregivers in 372 Peripheral Health Units in Sierra Leone.
- How
- Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) measuring routine vs. specialized health visits, average visit duration, and household spatial/social distance under meritocratic vs. control promotion regimes over a 10-month period.
What to do
Design meritocratic promotion evaluation metrics that combine quantitative volume with unannounced quality checks and visit duration to prevent multitasking effort distortion.
From the source
"Such a quantity-quality trade-off does not exist in our context: the average visit length increases by 15% in Tmerit=1 relative to Tmerit=0 (Table 1, column 8), routine visits increase and most of the other types of visits increase too (Table A.4), and household targeting does not change (Table A.5)."
Promotions_and_Productivity_The_Role_of_Meritocracy_and_Pay_Progression.pdf