The impact of COVID-19 on the willingness to work in teams

This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals' willingness to work in teams, using an online experiment. We implement a setup where individuals can either choose to work on a real effort task individually or together with a partner through online communication. We find that although working in a team is more profitable, participants primed with COVID-19 are less likely to self-select into teamwork, with potential payoff losses. In our sample, most of the participants make costly decisions by preferring individual work over teamwork despite their expectations of the productivity advantage of teamwork. Our analysis shows that social confidence, the pure willingness to socialize and exposure to teamwork significantly predict the decision of avoiding socially interactive work environments and relevant efficiency consequences.