Organizational Structure, Communication, and Group Ethics

摘要

Our experimental analysis shows that decision-making structures can have significant effects on distributive outcomes. We highlighted three results. First, we made comparisons in the absence of verbal communication. Vertical firms alleviate the perceived responsibility of subordinates and generate less ethical outcomes than averaging-protocol horizontal firms. Responsibility-diffusion in consensus-based horizontal firms makes them similar to vertical firms and significantly less ethical than the averaging firms. This diffusion results from a dynamic alleviation of responsibility among proposers who readily "compromise" down towards a colleague's less kind proposal. By contrast, averaging-protocol firms do not generate responsibility-diffusion, because insiders cannot blame a need for consensus.