The impact of COVID-19 on the willingness to work in teams

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals’ willingness to work in teams, using an online experiment. We implement a setup where individuals can choose to work on a real effort task either individually or together with a partner through online interaction. We find that although working in a team is more profitable and participants also expect this, a large fraction makes a financially costly decision by shying away from teamwork. Moreover, participants primed with COVID-19 are less likely to self-select into teamwork in a dynamic setting with two team selection periods, with the effect coming mainly from the second selection period, after a random fraction of participants are exogenously assigned to teamwork. We find that in addition to COVID-19 salience, social confidence, the willingness to socialize, and prior exposure to teamwork are significant predictors of the decision to join or avoid socially interactive work environments. Our findings provide insights into the potential impact of the pandemic on social interactions in a work setting.