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Dr. Wei Cai
Assistant Professor
Accounting Division
Columbia University

Upward influencers, employees that are more favorably perceived by their supervisors than their peers and subordinates, are ubiquitous in various forms of organizations. However, despite the prevalence of upward influencers and their relevance to various management control outcomes, the empirical evidence on the performance consequences of employees’ upward influencing activity in a team setting is generally lacking. This paper contributes by examining the impact of upward influencers on team performance using proprietary data from a service-providing organization. Our identification strategy relies on the plausibly exogenous team assignment at the organization, and we make use of its 360-degree evaluation data to identify upward influencers. We find that the relationship between the proportion of upward influencers on a team and team performance is nonlinear and exhibits an inverted-U shape. Our findings also reveal that upward influencers positively influence team performance through building better vertical relationship with supervisors. At the same time, they negatively influence team performance by impairing horizontal relationship with colleagues. Moreover, we show that the impact of upward influencers on team performance is more pronounced when the need for collaboration and information sharing is high and when managers are less experienced. Taken together, this study has important implications on team composition and managerial experience as control systems.