Motivated Agents with Career Concerns: Signalling skills and organizational involvement

Abstract

The paper studies the interaction between two kinds of incentives: career concerns and intrinsic motivation emerging from agent’s alignment with organization’s objectives or another source of organizational involve- ment. The information on both skills and involvement can be asymmetric and is updated over time, as in standard career concerns model. It is shown that career concerns is weakened for the involved agent. The agent with low involvement can be more aggressive in career and reputation building at the earlier stages of career, but will be outperformed by the more involved agent in the long-run. The results of the analysis are applied to a number of contexts.