The science of sales leaderboards and rank-based status anxiety

TEST_YOURSELF · How well do you know this science?

1. 01 According to Lazear and Rosen's 1981 tournament theory, what actually drives how hard someone works under rank-based pay?

   The average payout across every rankThe total number of people on the teamThe size of the prize spread between adjacent ranksHow many friends a person has at work

   Lazear and Rosen showed that in a rank-order tournament, effort is a function of the gap between adjacent prizes, not their average level — a wider spread between your rank and the next one up pushes harder. source ↗

2. 02 According to Greenberg, Ashton-James and Ashkanasy's 2007 review, where do social comparison processes show up in organizational life?

   Only during salary negotiationsOnly in fully remote or virtual teamsOnly among the very top performersPerformance appraisal, organizational justice, stress and leadership, among others

   The review concluded social comparison threads through performance appraisal, organizational justice, virtual work, workplace affect, stress and leadership — not a narrow corner of work life but a pervasive process employees actively engage in. source ↗

3. 03 In Landers, Bauer and Callan's 2017 experiment, what happened when a bare leaderboard was added with no explicit goal?

   It had no measurable effect on effortIt decreased effort because of added pressureIt raised effort to roughly the level of an explicit difficult or impossible goalIt only raised effort among people already at the top

   Participants shown only a leaderboard, with no stated goal, performed at roughly the level of participants given an explicit difficult or impossible goal — the leaderboard implicitly supplies a demanding goal. source ↗

4. 04 What was the key finding of Sunder, Kumar, Goreczny and Maurer's 2017 study of salesperson turnover?

   A salesperson's own results were the only driver of quittingPeer performance variance and peer turnover predicted quitting more strongly than a person's own resultsOnly underperforming salespeople ever quitPeer effects only mattered during a salesperson's first year

   Tracking 6,727 salespeople for two years, the study found peer performance variance and peer turnover were more pronounced predictors of an individual's own quitting than that individual's own revenue and satisfaction results. source ↗

5. 05 What did Keshabyan and Day's 2020 study conclude about status anxiety at work?

   It is identical to general job insecurityIt only affects employees in their first year on the jobIt has no measurable relationship to job satisfactionIt is a distinct, measurable construct that uniquely predicts lower job satisfaction

   Keshabyan and Day operationalized status anxiety as its own construct and showed it predicted lower job satisfaction beyond job insecurity, occupational self-efficacy, and organizational justice perceptions — a real, separate driver, not a proxy for other worries. source ↗