Brown Bag SEMinar of IDLab and St.Petersburg School of Economics and Management

Petr Parshakov presented a study at the BrownBag seminar 

Petr Parshakov (ID Lab in Perm) presented an update to the study the Job Change and Productivity: The Effect of High-Performance Expectations. The previous steps have been presented several times earlier at laboratory seminars and other scientific events.

The study is devoted to identifying the effect of high or, on the contrary, low expectations on individual performance. When changing their jobs, some people experience high-performance expectations and may feel psychological pressure. This phenomenon is widely studied in the literature. However, any empirical examination of this kind of market pressure is impeded due to the latent nature of the phenomenon. The major problem of all of the empirical tests, especially on traditional business cases, is the lack of individual longitudinal data on performance. Meanwhile, professional sports and football, in particular, delivers an explicit measure of performance expectations expressed by transfer fees. Expensive transfers of star players, like the €105 million transfer of Paul Pogba from Juventus to Manchester United, cause debates in media on whether the player is worth its price. Such discussion in media, between fans or even teammates, puts external pressure on the player being under the transfer process. On the one hand, employees who face high-performance expectations might exert more effort into completing a task, and, therefore, demonstrate better performance. On the other hand, a well-known psychological pressure may negatively correct individual performance. In the study, the authors use football labor market data to test whether a psychological pressure due to high expectations affects players’ performance in case of transfers between clubs. The main finding is that the effect of high-performance expectations is generally negative. Still, the magnitude of this effect is heterogeneous, depending on the personal characteristics of a particular player.



This time the seminar was planned in the BrownBag (informal) format. However, in the case of an online seminar, it is difficult to say about significant differences. We look forward to when the BrownBag seminar is offline!