Teamwork and Spillover Effects in Performance Evaluations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how coworker performance influences individual performance evaluations in teamwork settings, revealing significant spillover effects that impact career advancement and are dependent on reference points.

Contribution

It introduces causal machine learning methods to measure spillover effects in performance evaluations using football match data, highlighting the role of coworker performance in career outcomes.

Findings

Coworker shooting performance significantly affects evaluations.

Spillover effects are reference point dependent.

Positive deviations lead to positive spillovers, negative deviations do not harm.

Abstract

This article shows how coworker performance affects individual performance evaluation in a teamwork setting at the workplace. We use high-quality data on football matches to measure an important component of individual performance, shooting performance, isolated from collaborative effects. Employing causal machine learning methods, we address the assortative matching of workers and estimate both average and heterogeneous effects. There is substantial evidence for spillover effects in performance evaluations. Coworker shooting performance, meaningfully impacts both, manager decisions and third-party expert evaluations of individual performance. Our results underscore the significant role coworkers play in shaping career advancements and highlight a complementary channel, to productivity gains and learning effects, how coworkers impact career advancement. We characterize the groups of workers that are most and least affected by spillover effects and show that spillover effects are reference point dependent. While positive deviations from a reference point create positive spillover effects, negative deviations are not harmful for coworkers.