Peer Influence in the Workplace: Evidence from an Enterprise Digital Platform

We investigate how the sharing of peer success on an enterprise digital platform influences other workers’ work effort. We focus on one important advantage that organizations gain from using digital platforms—the ability to regulate the content of the messages by incorporating various elements about peers. Specifically, we examined two types of peer success messages: messages that highlight a peer’s effort (i.e., effort-focused success messages) and messages that highlight a peer’s ability (i.e., ability-focused success messages). Using data from a group of sales workers in an information technology service company, as well as an experiment with online participants, we found that both ability-focused success messages and effort-focused success messages can motivate workers to work harder, although we observed important heterogeneity in the responses. In particular, workers’ responses to effort-focused messages remained strong regardless of social distance between the worker and the peer. In contrast, workers’ response to ability-focused messages was stronger when the messages praised the ability of peers who were socially close but not that of peers who were socially distant.