Social undermining as a dark side of symbolic awards: Evidence from a regression discontinuity design
研究发现，在保险公司中，勉强获得象征性绩效奖励的员工后续表现反而比未获奖者更差，尤其在竞争激烈的团队中，这主要是由于同事的蓄意破坏行为所致。
In this paper, we study the effects of non-monetary symbolic awards on winners, losers, and their peers. Using a regression discontinuity design, we examine post-award performance differences between those who barely won a symbolic performance award and those who came just short of winning the award in a large insurance company (Study 1). Our findings show that awarded workers performed worse than their non-awarded counterparts, and worse performance was more severe in more competitive teams. Building on these findings, we explore potential mechanisms using an incentivized real-effort experiment (Study 2). The experiment reveals that award winners’ worse post-award performance relative to unawarded workers was driven by social undermining in the form of deliberate sabotage by coworkers, rather than award winners’ own behavioral changes due to negative motivational effects.