Abstract
To encourage worker productivity, companies routinely adopt policies requiring employees to delay gratification. For example, offices might prohibit use of the internet for personal purposes during regular business hours. Recent work in social psychology, however, suggests that using willpower to delay gratification can negatively impact performance. We report data from an experiment where subjects in a Willpower Treatment are asked to resist the temptation to join others in watching a humorous video for 10 minutes. In relation to a baseline treatment that does not require willpower, we show that resisting this temptation detrimentally impacts economic productivity on a subsequent task.
Highlights
The office place is filled with tempting distractions from one’s work, including everything from socialization with colleagues to napping
– Skill effect: The group variable ‘‘Willpower treatment (WT)’’ is negative, suggesting that the WT sample is more skilled than the No Willpower Treatment (NWT) sample
In this paper we find that subjects required to resist the temptation of a humorous video made significantly larger mistakes on a subsequent counting task
Summary
The office place is filled with tempting distractions from one’s work, including everything from socialization with colleagues to napping. In some workplaces a temptation is the Internet. A widely cited survey conducted in 2005 by America Online and Salary.com ranked personal Internet use as the number one way people waste time at work [1]. Some offices adopt policies prohibiting Internet use during work hours, with some even monitoring employees’ Internet activities. Many employees delay gratification and wait until the workday ends to use the Internet. A well-established result from social psychology is that using willpower to delay gratification, whether from the Internet or any of many other temptations, can detrimentally impact performance on subsequent tasks [2]
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