Why it helps to have an efficient co-worker

THE PRESENCE of high-performing colleagues may improve an individual’s earnings, suggests a new study by researchers at the University of York. The team, which also included researchers at University College London (UCL), found that in low-skilled occupations, an increase of 10% in the average performance of co-workers raises a worker’s wage by almost 1%.

This effect is most likely driven by increased productivity because of pressure to keep up with better coworkers, said researchers who studied wage records from administrative social security data for millions of workers and all of their co-workers over a period of 15-years across 330 professions in a large metropolitan area of Germany.

“We would expect that some positive practices would ‘rub off’ on coworkers and in fact we knew from previous research that such effects exist for specific occupations,” said Thomas Cornelissen, researcher at the University of York.

“For example, a US study showed that supermarket cashiers scanned shopping items faster when they worked the same shifts as fast-working employees,” said Cornelissen.

“Our research showed that this effect was not unique to shop workers, but is applicable across many lowskilled jobs, such as waiters, warehouse workers and agricultural assistants... Moreover, our results show that improvements in performance due to co-worker quality raise a worker’s wages, something that hadn’t previously been analysed,” he said. It was not clearly understood whether improvements in performance were due to learning from colleagues or whether it was more to do with the pressure to keep up.

The researchers found that when a high-performing co-worker left the company in a low-skilled job, the remaining workers tended to ‘slip backwards’. AGENCIES