Governing Adaptation -super-1

Abstract

To remain competitive, an organization must both respond to information about its environment and coordinate its activities. We analyse how the allocation of decision rights within an organizational hierarchy influences the organization's ability to solve such problems of coordinated adaptation when information is both soft and distributed inside the organization and the organizational participants behave strategically. The results show that, contrary to the common intuition, the performance differential between centralized and decentralized decision-making is non-monotone in the importance of coordination. Further, both these common structures are dominated by asymmetric structures in sufficiently asymmetric environments (such as a small division developing a new product in the presence of a large division with an established product). Finally, if the incentive conflicts between the participants can be made sufficiently small, centralized decision-making is always dominated by decentralized decision-making. Copyright 2008, Wiley-Blackwell.

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