Assistant Professor of Strategic Management | Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Abstract: Pay tied to performance is a common approach to improving task outcomes, but it can also reshape behaviors it does not directly target. I propose that when workers are incentivized based on individual performance, a cost-based, selective logic migrates from the formal compensation system into an adjacent informal domain, transforming the logic that governs informal knowledge sharing. The result is a change in both the volume and the composition of informal knowledge sharing: with whom sharing occurs, what is shared, and how recipients engage with the knowledge they receive. I call this process the incidental marketization of informal knowledge sharing. I study a firm’s transition from flat wages to individual performance-based compensation, drawing on digital trace data from its electronic information system. The server logs record every user action on the platform, yielding 236,679 knowledge-sharing events over 37 months and allowing direct observation of individual behavior. I find that aggregate sharing declined, while the sharing that persisted concentrated within reciprocal ties, shifted toward task-applicable content, and attracted more active engagement from recipients. These findings illuminate how compensation structures can reshape informal knowledge flows, revealing how formal organizational systems reach into and reorganize the informal behaviors alongside them.
Abstract: Organizations invest heavily in digital knowledge tools on the premise that giving everyone equal access to accumulated organizational knowledge flattens differences across individuals. Yet individuals who share the same system engage it in persistently different ways. I argue that this heterogeneity reflects not competence but composition: occupational tenure shapes the kind of knowledge a person holds, experiential and codified, acquired at different times, and in turn how they search a shared system. Using server-side transaction logs from a professional services firm, I measure usage intensity, search efforts, and knowledge retention, the last measured inversely by the frequency of repeated queries. Study 1 follows the firm-wide introduction of a digital information system and shows that use diverged along tenure rather than converging: longer-tenure employees used the system less intensively, exerted greater search efforts, and repeated prior queries less often. Study 2 examines a later shift to individual performance-based incentives and shows that this pattern is not fixed within individuals: facing the same incentive, longer- and shorter-tenure employees adjusted their engagement in opposite directions. Heterogeneity in digital tool use is a structural feature of any workforce spanning career stages, and one reshaped by the conditions surrounding the tool.
Abstract: When an industry experiences a major failure, observers look to aggregate signals of firm response to judge whether the response is adequate. We argue that aggregate signals can mask sharply uneven patterns of individual behavior beneath them, and we show what those patterns look like using detailed individual-level data on inspectors at a maritime inspection firm following a major accident. Some inspectors do not shift their attention at all. Among those who do, the form of the shift varies. Inspectors with lower professionalism increase their client-visible work sharply while reducing the less-visible parts of their work, substituting one type of effort for the other. Inspectors with higher professionalism increase their client-visible work more modestly while maintaining the less-visible parts of the job, adding to their effort rather than reorganizing it. Aggregate measures collapse these patterns into a single signal that hides the substitution underneath. The findings extend the attention-based view to the level of frontline workers, identify professionalism as a factor that shapes the form of attentional response to a shock, and show that when firm-level signals appear to indicate organizational response to crisis, the response may be partly composed of effort redirected from the less-visible work that previously made up the job.
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