Mutual Monitoring and Team Member Communication in Teams

This study investigates whether the benefit firms can extract from team member communication to the team manager—who may use such information for rewarding individual team members—is affected by differences in the type of mutual monitoring information available to team members. We predict and find that team performance is higher when team members can observe only each other's effort than when they can observe both each other's effort and output levels; conversely, team performance is lower when team members can observe only each other's output than when they can observe both each other's effort and output levels. The intuition behind these results is that the type of observable mutual monitoring information creates different degrees of ambiguity regarding what should be considered a fair reward allocation for team members' contributions. Such ambiguity reduces the usefulness of team member communication to the manager for allocating rewards, resulting in lower team performance.Data Availability: Data are available from the authors upon request.