The Distribution of Decision Rights within the Workplace: Evidence from Canadian, Australian, and UK Establishments

Abstract

May 2007 The allocation of decision rights in an organization reflects a trade-off between the costs of transferring relevant information and the costs that occur when decision-making agents have different objectives than the principal. We analyze the tradeoff between the costs of delaying a decision and delegating decision rights, and use three broad, cross-sectional data sets to study the allocation of decision rights in countries with different labor markets. We compare the decentralization of decision rights within hierarchies, and identify establishment characteristics and human resource practices related to the location of decision rights. The degree of competition, establishment age, and a history of technological change are all closely associated with decentralized decision rights across surveys. The relationship with unions differs by country. A number of workplace practices, many of which are used to define “high involvement” workplaces, also positively correlate with decision rights.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.