Perceived Legitimacy and Motivation Effects of Authority

Holger Herz and Christian Zihlmann

No 533, FSES Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland

Abstract: 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, we design a laboratory experiment in which we exogenously manipulate the organizational structure in a way that leaves the incentives of all individuals unaffected, but changes the perceived legitimacy of the organizational structure. Our data show that organizational structure indeed affects behavior beyond monetary incentive effects and that the observed changes are significantly associated with changes in perceived legitimacy..

Keywords: Legitimacy; Organization; Motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D23 D91 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://folia.unifr.ch/documents/327756/files/WP_SES_533.pdf?download (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fri:fribow:fribow00533

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/327756

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FSES Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland Bd de Pérolles 90, CH-1700 Fribourg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mustapha Obbad ().