Revving Up or Backing Down? Cross-Level Effects of Firm-Level Tournaments on Employees’ Competitive Actions
研究企业层级竞赛如何通过声誉激励影响员工对内和对外的竞争行为，发现竞争威胁减少内部竞争但增加外部竞争，而竞争机会则同时增加两者，且资源劣势或优势对手的影响更大。
The tournament literature has typically traced employees’ competitive actions to characteristics of individual-level career tournaments. Yet, such individual-level tournaments usually transcend firms that themselves compete in a firm-level tournament. We study the cross-level implications of a firm-level tournament for the competitive actions that constituent employees undertake against other individuals internal and external to their firm. We propose a theory of individual reputational incentives, which predicts that a firm’s competitive threats decrease its employees’ internal competitive actions yet increase their external competitive actions, while a firm’s competitive opportunities increase employees’ internal and external competitive actions. The theory also predicts that these effects are largest when a firm faces potential unexpected losses or gains in its standing, such as when the firm experiences competitive threats from resource-disadvantaged firms, or competitive opportunities against resource-advantaged firms. In panel data on the population of motorcycle riders competing in MotoGP from 2004 to 2020, we examine these hypotheses using overtakes to measure riders’ internal and external competitive actions. Our findings reveal how riders adjust their internal and external overtakes based on their team’s competitive threats and opportunities, and on the relative resource endowments of the teams supplying such threats or opportunities.