Leadership Styles and Labor Market Conditions
研究为何有些领导用表扬激励员工而另一些用惩罚，发现工资下限（如工会谈判或最低工资）使惩罚性领导更有利可图，尽管社会效率低，但能帮企业减少奖金支出、从员工身上榨取租金。
Why do some leaders use praise as a means to motivate workers, whereas other leaders use social punishment? This paper develops a simple economic model to examine how leadership styles depend on the prevailing labor market conditions for workers. We show that the existence of a binding wage floor for workers (e.g., due to trade union wage bargaining, minimum wage legislation, or limited-liability protection) can make it attractive for firms to hire a leader who makes use of social punishment. Although the use of social punishments generally is socially inefficient, it lessens the need for high bonus pay, which allows the firm to extract rents from the worker. In contrast, firms hire leaders who provide praise to workers only if it is socially efficient to do so. Credible use of leadership styles requires either repeated interaction or a leader with the right social preferences. In a single-period setting, only moderately altruistic leaders use praise as a motivation tool, whereas only moderately spiteful leaders use social punishment. Lastly, we show that when the leaders’ and workers’ reservation utilities give rise to a bigger income gap between leaders and workers, attracting spiteful leaders becomes relatively less costly and unfriendly leadership becomes more prevalent. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics and decision analysis.