Monitoring, reputation, and ‘greenbeard’ reciprocity in a Shuar work team
研究舒阿尔人工作团队中的集体行动，发现成员能准确区分故意不合作者和意外不合作者，且感知到的合作者声誉更好，对提升团队合作有直接启示。
Abstract A collective action (CA), i.e., a group of individuals jointly producing a resource to be shared equally among themselves, is a common interaction in organizational contexts. Ancestral humans who were predisposed to cooperate in CAs would have risked being disadvantaged compared to free riders, but could have overcome this disadvantage through ‘greenbeard’ reciprocity, that is, by assessing the extent to which co‐interactants were also predisposed towards cooperation, and then cooperating to the extent that they expected co‐interactants to reciprocate. Assessment of others' cooperativeness could have been based on the direct monitoring of, and on reputational information about, others' cooperativeness. This theory predicts that (1) CA participants should monitor accurately, and (2) perceived higher‐cooperators should have better reputations. These predictions were supported in a study of real‐life CAs carried out by a group of Shuar hunter‐horticulturalists: (1) members accurately distinguished ‘intentional’ non‐cooperators (who could have cooperated but chose not to) from ‘accidental’ non‐cooperators (who were unable to cooperate), and their perceptions of co‐member cooperativeness accurately reflected more objective measures of this cooperativeness; and (2) perceived intentional cooperators had better reputations than perceived intentional non‐cooperators. These results have direct applications in organizational contexts, for example, for increasing cooperativeness in self‐directed work teams. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.