Social undermining as a dark side of symbolic awards: Evidence from a regression discontinuity design
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we study the effects of non-monetary symbolic awards on winners, losers, and their peers. Using a regression discontinuity design, we examine post-award performance differences between those who barely won a symbolic performance award and those who came just short of winning the award in a large insurance company (Study 1). Our findings show that awarded workers performed worse than their non-awarded counterparts, and worse performance was more severe in more competitive teams. Building on these findings, we explore potential mechanisms using an incentivized real-effort experiment (Study 2). The experiment reveals that award winners’ worse post-award performance relative to unawarded workers was driven by social undermining in the form of deliberate sabotage by coworkers, rather than award winners’ own behavioral changes due to negative motivational effects.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it