Tournament Incentive Heterogeneity by Worker Rank and Horizon
RCTClinical Trial
Rank-order promotion tournaments generate uneven productivity responses across an organization if low-performing workers or employees facing distant promotion horizons perceive winning as impossible or remote.
Picture this
Think of a contest where only the top runners on the track and those nearing the finish line run at top speed, while runners far behind or at the start of a long marathon pace themselves because the prize feels out of reach or too far off.
What the evidence says
Meritocratic promotions boosted household visits by 38% (+2.348 visits; p < 0.01) for high-ranked workers versus +0.965 for low-ranked workers, and by 45% (+3.476 visits; p < 0.01) for workers expecting a supervisor retirement within 5 years versus +1.260 for distant horizons.
- Who was studied
- N = 1,830 to 1,966 Community Health Workers across 372 Peripheral Health Units in Sierra Leone, categorized by baseline supervisor-reported performance rank and supervisor retirement timeline.
- How
- Heterogeneity analysis within a randomized field experiment, measuring worker productivity shifts across performance rank tiers (top 3 vs. lower) and supervisor retirement proximity (within 5 years vs. longer).
What to do
Structure promotion tournaments with intermediate progression tiers or targeted incentives for workers outside immediate promotion eligibility windows to maintain broad-based workforce effort.
From the source
"Figure 2 (Panel B) and the corresponding Table 1 (column 2) show that increasing meritocracy boosts the number of visits provided by "high-rank" workers (top 3 of their PHU) by 2.348, a 38% increase relative to the average for these workers in Tmerit=0."
Promotions_and_Productivity_The_Role_of_Meritocracy_and_Pay_Progression.pdf