"Groups of workers that voted to determine their compensation scheme provided significantly more effort than groups that had no say in how they would be compensated."
Check out this interesting study, which just came out: http://ftp.iza.org/dp5460.pdf
Despite the difficulties to produce empirical evidence, it seems that a team of scientists at Middlebury College in Vermont and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany notably succeeded to prove that "consistant with intuition, allowing groups of workers to participate in determining the compensation scheme for their group increases effort significantly."
Scientists developed a behavioral experiment in which 180 subjects were able to earn money by solving math problems. The participants were divided into groups of three. Half of the teams could decide by majority vote whether the jointly produced profits staggered in equal parts OR to be paid to individucal employees depending on their performance. The other half had no influence on the compensation model.
It clearly showed that participants who could determine the model were more effective and motivated: they worked an average of seven percent more and increased productivity, as measured by the number of correctly solved tasks by nine percent. It did not matter, for which wage model, the group had decided.
Philip Mellizo / Jeffrey Carpenter / Peter Hans Matthews:
Workplace Democracy in the Lab, IZA Discussion Paper No. 5460
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