How Rules Operate in Practice: the Team Productivity Bonus, Productivity and Work Quality at AME, 1992–2000

According to incentive theorists, rules produce the same results wherever they are applied. This reason for this, it is said, is that they are implemented mechanically by actors who are assumed to be identical and within groups that exist only through the temporary interaction of individuals. When this is not the case, the only possible explanation must lie in the fact that the groups being compared (work teams) are not comparable, primarily because their technical and individual characteristics are too heterogeneous. The AME of the Paris Métro offers particularly fertile ground for investigating the effects of identical rules on work groups. Such opportunities are rare indeed, since organizations seldom keep data such as those kept by AME over such a long period. Eight years have now elapsed since the introduction of the team productivity bonus scheme, or DEC to use its French acronym; this is sufficient time for us to be able to take stock and bring our investigation to a successful conclusion, provided we can first demonstrate that the teams are comparable and that the exogenous shocks, if there were any, have been neutralized by certain rules governing the management of the DEC. This is the subject of the second section of this chapter. Subsequent statistical analysis of the evolution of labour productivity and of work quality indicators (debt levels and fault recurrence rates) among the AME production teams and examination of the amendments to the team contracts produce two main findings.