The allocation of decision-making authorities may be seen as the last link in a causal relationship starting from changes in environment and continuing to business strategy. Changes in task complexity, which can be measured by the introduction of a diversi ca- tion or an outsourcing strategy,...

This paper studies how morale in teams can break down. It interprets high morale as team members working together productively, either because of a sense of fairness or because of implicit incentives from repeated interactions. Team members learn that lay-offs will occur at a fixed future date,...

The paper at hand is the first that explores the notion of attachment orientations, i.e. attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance, influencing individual attachment towards an organization, i.e. employees' affective, normative and continuance commitment. Findings of a questionnaire survey...

This paper studies how a three-layer hierarchical firm (principal-supervisor-agent) optimally creates effort norms for its employees. The key assumption is that effort norms are affected by the example of superiors. In equilibrium, norms are eroded as one moves down the hierarchy. The reason is...

Organizational structures are an important determinant of individual incentives and thus individual motivation in organizations. We study whether their effects on individual motivation go beyond incentives and how they relate to the perceived legitimacy of organizational structure. To this end,...

This theoretical paper explores the impact of gender diversity on team production. The key assumption is that men derive utility from signaling high ability to female colleagues. The analysis shows that some gender diversity maximizes expected team production if (i) men and women have similar...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

The most influential approach of corporate governance, the view of shareholders supremacy does not take into consideration that the key task of modern corporations is to generate and transfer firm-specific knowledge. It proposes that, in order to overcome the widespread corporate scandals, the...

The paper analyzes how the choice of organizational structure leads to the best compromise between controlling behavior based on authority rights and minimizing costs for implementing high efforts. Concentrated delegation and hierarchical delegation turn out to be never an optimal compromise. If...

Do contractual institutions and a country's level of trust interact in their impact on the international make-or-buy decision? By analyzing explicit and implicit contracting in a unified framework, I show that better formal contractibility may both facilitate and hinder relational contracting on...