The past decades witnessed a broad trend towards flatter organizations with less hierarchical layers. A reduction of the number of management levels in a corpora- tion can have both positive and negative effects on firm performance with the net effect being theoretically unclear ex ante. The...

Flexibility and heterogeneity are important topics in labour market research. Since 2004 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has funded a research network addressing the issue of 'Flexibility in Heterogeneous Labour Markets', which intends to uncover possibilities for fostering...

This article summarizes recent studies concerning the effects of organizational change on fundamental economic variables. The framework applied to take account of possible selectivity effects is explained in detail. This methodology is applied to the effects of profits sharing and the legal...

Although the performance effects of multitasking were analyzed intensively in the past, little is known about the impact of the adoption time of multitasking on corporate performance. Possibly, the quantity of the reorganization is crucial and early movers experience a comparative competitive...

The objective in this study was to examine whether a firm's economic/financial success can be associated with the application of certain HRM policies, practices and strategies. In this empirical study, an extended rationale borrowed from a configurational conceptual model was used in order to...

In this work we discuss the impact of the new ICT techno-economic paradigm upon the vertical and horizontal boundaries of the firm and ask whether the change in the sources of competitive advantage has resulted in changes in the size distribution of firms and also in the degree of concentration...

An organization is a collection of agents that interact and produce some form of output. Formal organizations - such as corporations and governments - are typically constructed for an explicit purpose though this purpose needn’t be shared by all organizational members. An entrepreneur who...

This paper studies the issue of designing an optimal organizational form: design for sub-units' task allocation, decision-making structure, and incentive schemes for organizational members. Depending on the way tasks are allocated between the sub-units, and whether decision-making is centralized...

We develop a theory of organization design in which the firm's structure is chosen to mitigate moral hazard problems in the selection and the implementation of projects. For a given set of projects, the 'divisional structure' which gives each agent the full responsibility over a subset of...