Mutual Monitoring and Team Member Communication in Teams

Arnold, Markus C.; Hannan, R. Lynn; Tafkov, Ivo D. (2019). Mutual Monitoring and Team Member Communication in Teams. The Accounting Review, 95(5), pp. 1-21. American Accounting Association 10.2308/accr-52659

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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.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Department of Business Management > Institute for Accounting and Controlling > Managerial Accounting

UniBE Contributor:

Arnold, Markus Christopher

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 330 Economics
600 Technology > 650 Management & public relations

ISSN:

1558-7967

Publisher:

American Accounting Association

Language:

English

Submitter:

Alexandra Neuenschwander

Date Deposited:

17 Sep 2018 15:09

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:17

Publisher DOI:

10.2308/accr-52659

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Team-based incentives, mutual monitoring, team member communication, subjective performance evaluation

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.119500

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/119500

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