Temptation at work
By: Alessandro Bucciol, Daniel Houser, Marco Piovesan
Contributors: Houser, Daniel; Piovesan, Marco; Harvard Business School
Series: Working paper / Harvard Business School -- 11-090; Working paper (Harvard Business School) -- 11-090.
Publisher: Harvard Business School
Published: 2011
Place of publication: [Boston]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 14
Description: To encourage worker productivity offices prohibit Internet use. Consequently, many employees delay Internet activity to the end of the workday. 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.
Notes: "February 2011"--Publisher's website.

Includes bibliographical references.