From Last Place to Group Gains: Low-Performers and Group Performance
Abstract
How do performance improvements of laggards, the lowest-performing individuals in a team, influence group performance? Drawing on social comparison theory and the concept of last place aversion, we suggest that the improvement of a laggard’s performance can serve as a catalyst for enhancing the entire group’s output, because other group members will enhance their own efforts to avoid falling into last place. Using nearly eight years of data from an industrial firm, we examine how laggards’ performance influences the performance of their groups. Our results show that improvements in laggards’ performance significantly enhance subsequent performance of the remaining group. This performance enhancing effect is particularly pronounced for those group members ranked near the bottom of the hierarchy. Moreover, this effect differs between groups and depends on how salient it is within groups that the laggard can change and how close the performance of other group members is to the laggards’ performance. Our findings extend research on rank-based motivation by documenting field evidence consistent with last place aversion and its contingent impact on group performance.
Keywords : Group performance, downward comparison, last-place aversion