Ratchet Effect In The Workplace / 职场棘轮效应

Ratchet effect in the workplace is 79.各位领导，但凡咱学点博弈论：契约理论如何解释职场管理’s explanation for why employees may hesitate to reveal peak effort immediately. The episode defines the ratchet effect as a pattern where past performance becomes the baseline for future demands, making upward target adjustment hard to reverse.

The source’s employee-side advice is not simple laziness. It asks workers to manage expectations under [[InformationAsymmetryInContracts|information asymmetry]]: if a new employee gives 100% from the start, a manager may treat that as ordinary capacity and keep raising tasks beyond a sustainable level.

Key Claims

• Performance baselines are signals, and managers may not know whether an output level is normal, lucky, or at the worker’s limit.
• Ratcheting can make high effort self-punishing when future targets rise without matching resources or rewards.
• Managers can reduce the effect through relative performance comparison, explicit career ladders, rotation, or seniority-based elements.
• The tradeoff is real: mechanisms that protect employees from ratcheting can reduce efficiency or precision if designed poorly.

Connections

• Workplace Incentive Design, Subjective Performance Incentives / 主观绩效激励, and Mixed Incentive Contracts / 组合激励契约 - management design branch.
• Signal Design / 信号设计 and Information Asymmetry In Contracts / 契约中的信息不对称 - why output becomes a contested signal.
• Goodhart’s Law and Workplace Metric Gaming - adjacent measurement-incentive pages.