Worker autonomy and performance: Evidence from a real-effort experiment

Abstract

Worker flexibility in effort allocation is a crucial factor for productivity and optimal job design. This paper runs a real-effort experiment that manipulates both the degree and type of autonomy individuals have in scheduling their effort, and it examines the causal effects of these manipulations on final performance. The main findings come from comparing subjects with different levels of cognitive ability. Using individual data on scheduling decisions, I find significant baseline differences in performance and effort-allocation strategies between high- and low-cognitive ability subjects. Moreover, the experiment shows that high-ability individuals reach higher performance when they have full scheduling flexibility while limiting any task-ordering possibility increases the performance of low-ability individuals. Overall, this paper provides new and robust evidence on the importance of cognitive ability in explaining effort-allocation decisions, and it identifies job design interventions to increase the performance of high- and low-ability workers.