Teamwork and delegation of decisions within the firm

Ricardo Flores-Fillol, Susana Iranzo and Ferran Mane ()

International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2017, vol. 52, issue C, 1-29

Abstract: Teamwork effort is related to a number of firm and workers’ outcomes such as firm productivity, innovation or job satisfaction. Thus, it becomes important to understand the factors conducive to teamwork. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between teamwork and the firm organizational design, with a particular emphasis on the decentralization of decision rights. We develop a simple model allowing for different organizational structures, according to whether or not production and firm strategic decisions are delegated. We find that overall delegation of decision making is positively associated with teamwork. However, when we distinguish between delegation of firm strategic decisions and delegation of production decisions, we obtain that it is just the delegation of firm strategic decisions that induces teamwork. We test the model predictions on a unique dataset of Spanish small and medium size firms that contains information on worker self-reported importance of teamwork. The empirical analysis also corroborates previous findings in the literature regarding the positive relation between cooperation and pay incentives.

Keywords: Teamwork; Delegation; Firm strategic decisions; Production decisions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 L23 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:indorg:v:52:y:2017:i:c:p:1-29

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijindorg.2017.01.008

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