Mutual Monitoring and Team Member Communication in Teams

Arnold, Markus C.; Hannan, R. Lynn; Tafkov, Ivo D. (2020). Mutual Monitoring and Team Member Communication in Teams. The Accounting Review, 95(5), pp. 1-21. American Accounting Association 10.2308/accr-52659

Text Arnold, Hannan & Tafkov, 2016.pdf - Submitted Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (376kB)

This study investigates whether the benefit firms can extract from team member communication to the team manager, who may use such information for rewarding individual team members, is affected by differences in the type of mutual monitoring information available to team members. We predict and find that team performance is higher when team members can observe only each other's effort than when they can observe both each other's effort and output levels; conversely, team performance is lower when team members can observe only each other's output than when they can observe both each other's effort and output levels. The intuition behind these results is that the type of observable mutual monitoring information creates different degrees of ambiguity regarding what should be considered a fair reward allocation for team members' contributions. Such ambiguity reduces the usefulness of team member communication to the manager for allocating rewards, resulting in lower team performance.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

4 since deposited on 17 Sep 2018
0 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item