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 the peers. Specifically, we examine 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 find that both ability-focused success messages and effort-focused success messages can motivate workers to work harder, although we observe important heterogeneity in the responses. In particular, a worker’s response to effort-focused messages remains strong regardless of social distance between the worker and the peers. In contrast, a worker’s response to ability-focused messages is stronger when the messages praise the ability of peers who are socially close, but not that of peers who are socially distant.