Team Governance: Empowerment or Hierarchical Control
We investigate the costs and benefits of managerial interventions with a team in which workers care to different
degrees about output. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if the team manager has
some information about team members, interventions by the manager may have destructive effects: they can
distort how workers perceive their co-worker and may lead to a reduction of effort by those workers who care
most about output. Moreover, interventions may hinder the development of a cooperative organizational culture
in which workers trust each other.
Published
Friebel, G. & Schnedler, W. (2011). Team Governance: Empowerment or Hierarchical Control, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 78, 1-13.
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