Team Governance: Empowerment or Hierarchical Control

Guido Friebel () and Wendelin Schnedler ()
Additional contact information
Wendelin Schnedler: University of Paderborn

No 3143, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate a team setting in which workers have different degrees of commitment to the outcome of their work. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if the team manager has some information about team members, interventions that the manager undertakes in order to assure certain efforts may have destructive effects: they can distort the way workers perceive their fellow workers and they may also lead to a reduction of effort by those workers that care most about output. Moreover, interventions may hinder the development of a cooperative organizational culture in which workers trust each other. Thus, our framework provides some first insights into the costs and benefits of interventions in teams. It identifies that team governance is driven by the importance of tasks that cannot be monitored. The more important these tasks, the more likely it is that teams are empowered.

Keywords: intrinsic motivation; team work; incentives; informed principal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D86 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2007-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cdm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2011, 78 (1-2), 1-13

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Related works:
Journal Article: Team governance: Empowerment or hierarchical control (2011)
Journal Article: Team governance: Empowerment or hierarchical control (2011)
Working Paper: Team Governance: Empowerment or Hierarchical Control (2011)
Working Paper: Team Governance: Empowerment or Hierarchical Control (2007)
Working Paper: Team Governance: Empowerment of Hierarchical Control (2007)
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