The paper reports an experimental study on a promotion-demotion mechanism to mitigate the free-rider problem in a voluntary contribution setting. The mechanism hierarchically splits a group in two; we refer to one subgroup as the Major league and to the other as the minor league. The most...

This paper proposes a system science restructuring of today's management practices. The paper discusses what we have learned from system science that gives us a new and different understanding of what the company is, and how it works; and a new way of understanding the world outside the company...

The integration of specialists’ search efforts is one of the principal purposes of organization. Integration mechanisms enable joint search by allowing interdependent others to form shared mental models of the joint task. However, apart from the formation of shared mental models, organization...

This paper describes a simple set of coordination structures that model certain kinds of information processing involved in organizations and markets. Four generic coordination structures are defined: product hierarchies, functional hierarchies, centralized markets, and decentralized markets....

This paper examines the contribution of supervisors to an organization's output by constructing a production function in which supervisors' time and case workers' time enter as inputs. There is a quality variable associated with output: average delay. The functional form of the production...

This paper is concerned with organizational information systems. Examples of such systems include intelligence systems, communications systems, management information systems, decision support systems, and administrative control systems. Systems such as these are critical to an organization's...

Most managers, when confronted with a difficult strategic decision, would like to know what is the prevailing practice in their industry. Prevailing practice interests managers, in part, because it may indicate which decisions are good, even "best." The rationale is "Darwinian economics," which...

The elements of organizational structuring---which show a curious tendency to appear in five's---suggest a typology of five basic configurations: Simple Structure, Machine Bureaucracy, Professional Bureaucracy, Divisionalized Form, and Adhocracy. The elements include (1) five basic parts of the...

The objective of this paper is to suggest some directions in the 1980s for the development of the theory and practice of planned change. The author makes two basic assumptions in approaching this objective. First, the two fields most widely associated with planned change, organization...