Leadership by Signaling in Teams

Claude Meidinger (1) , Marie Claire Villeval (2)

1 TEAM - Théories et Applications en Microéconomie et Macroéconomie
2 GATE - Groupe d'analyse et de théorie économique

How does informal leadership work in teams? Leadership is grounded on both the possession of a private information by the leader and by her ability to communicate credibly with followers in order to induce them to expand high efforts. This paper reports an experiment testing the efficiency of two costly communication devices introduced by Hermalin (1998): leading-byexample and leading-by-sacrifice. Experimental evidence shows that, when the leader's effort is observable by the follower, leadership works more through reciprocity than through signaling.
In leading-by-sacrifice where the follower can receive a side-payment from the leader, signaling is not used by the leader as a truthful communication device.

Mots clés: Leadership; Signaling; Communication; Reciprocity; Experiments; Teamwork

Domaines: Economies et finances

Claude Meidinger, Marie Claire Villeval. Leadership by Signaling in Teams. French Economic Association Conference (AFSE), May 2002, Lyon, France. ⟨halshs-00180208⟩