Culture of trust and division of labor in nonhierarchical teams

摘要

Research SummaryFirms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. Our paper provides evidence of a link between an organization's culturespecifically the trust environmentand its level of specialization. We show experimentally that exogenouslyimposed culture endogenously leads to variation in organizational form. We prime trust and demonstrate that the level of trust within an organization affects division of labor and consequently productivity in nonhierarchical teams. This evidence is consistent with a crosscountry link between trust and the division of labor that we observe in data from the European Social Survey.Managerial SummaryFirms vary among many dimensions such as culture and internal organization even within the same industry. Trust is one component of corporate culture that is crucial for cooperation within organizations. In this paper, we show that the trust dimension of corporate culture can affect firm performance through internal structure, in particular the degree of division of labor. Using evidence from a gametheoretic model, a lab experiment, and countrylevel data, we show that an increase in trust leads to increased worker specialization. Our results suggest that increasing trust in work environments where division of labor is beneficial is one way to boost team productivity.RESOURCESThis article has earned an Open Data badge for making publicly available the digitallyshareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at https://osf.io/pr39h/. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.