Exploring the impact of punishments on employee effort and performance in the workplace : Insights from England's premier league

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of punishment as a method of enforcing organizational policies, management literature provides little guidance on the impact of punishment on individuals' work performance. A sample of 412 professional soccer players in England's Premier League was utilized to collect unobtrusive, longitudinal data to better understand how individuals react to punishments in their workplace. Our findings indicate that individuals deploy significantly more effort (run more kilometers) following a punishment. However, the findings also indicate that individuals do not perform better following the administration of punishment. In fact, their performance is significantly lower than before the punishment. Although individuals work harder, they actually perform weaker. Further, we found that, when punished more than their team members, individuals deploy significantly more effort than individuals who get punished less than their team members but perform significantly weaker than those individuals.