Leadership and Overcoming Coordination Failure

领导力和克服协调失败

• 批准号: 1127704
• 负责人: David Cooper
• 金额: $ 40.39万
• 依托单位: Florida State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-15 至 2016-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1127704&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Leadership; Overcoming; Coordination; Failure

This award funds research that tests economic theories about how leadership can work to reduce coordination failures. Coordination failure is a common problem affecting many organizations. For example, a single individual's weak effort can drag down the performance of an entire group. An assembly line moves no faster than the slowest person in the line or a report doesn?t get finished until the last person completes their section. Organizations with a potential 'weak link' are prone to being caught in productivity traps where all individuals exert low effort. Leadership is a natural tool for managing and facilitating the process of transitioning to a better outcome. The PIs and their collaborators have a long standing interest in the relationship between coordination and leadership. Previous research demonstrates that able leaders can increase the odds of successful coordination, but imposing a leader is not a cure-all. The odds of success depend on who the leader is, how they are selected, the tools they have available, and how they exercise their leadership. We propose three projects which look at new environments in which coordination and leadership are important and examine previously untested mechanisms for making leaders more effective. (1) Centralized vs. Decentralized Management: Consider a firm with two divisions. The divisions can gain by coordinating their activities but each division has private information about the state of the world and, critically, the interests of the two divisions are not perfectly aligned. Is it better to have a central manager collect information from the divisions and impose choices on the divisions or to have the divisions share information and make decisions separately? Centralized management largely eliminates the coordination problem facing the divisions, but gives the divisions incentives to distort their reports to the central manager, leading to suboptimal outcomes. Alonso, Dessein, and Matouschek (2008) show that decentralization maximizes firm profits under broad conditions, but this result relies on behavioral assumptions that may be unrealistic. This award funds experiments that simplify the environment of Alonso et al, stacking the deck against centralization by eliminating information asymmetries between the divisions. The PIs conjecture that even in an environment biased against centralization, and contrary to theory, companies that use centralized management will outperform firms with a decentralized approach. (2) Leadership and Advice: Imagine a group of investors independently choosing whether to put their money into an investment opportunity. The return of the investment depends on the number of investors and an unknown state of the world. The investors receive advice from an adviser who knows the state of the world, but has incentives to suggest investment when it is not in the investors' best interest. Repeated interaction forces the adviser to reconcile short term gains from deceiving investors with a long-term concern for maintaining credibility. The PIs conduct experiments to study whether advisers can successfully use their superior information to generate coordination on an efficient equilibrium. They plan to relate the results of this experiment with some of the problems facing economic policy makers as they try to lift a country out of a recession like the one currently affecting the U.S.(3) Learning to Lead: Leaders can help groups overcome coordination failure. Nonetheless many groups with leaders fail to coordinate on an efficient outcome. This occurs not just because of bad luck, but also because leaders make systematic errors. Because specific errors can be identified, it seems plausible that bad leaders can be transformed into good ones if they can learn (or can be taught) to avoid these errors. The third project uses economic experiments to examine possible ways of improving leaders' performance: direct experience, indirect experience, and several different varieties of advice.Intellectual Merit: Understanding how leaders function in a variety of settings is central to improving our knowledge of how organizations can achieve efficient coordination. Beyond an expansion our knowledge of leadership, the research presented here is intend to improve the design of institutions and the training of leaders to make it less likely that a productivity trap will persist. Expected Broader Impact: Coordination problems play an important role in many economic failures. Put simply, the economy can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people believe the economy is going to do poorly, it will. The work proposed here is intended to help develop institutions and strategies for leaders that will make it easier to escape from productivity traps. Software and techniques developed with the proposed research should be useful in teaching a wide variety of economics and business courses. Research assistants will receive valuable training.

该奖项资助的研究，测试经济理论如何领导可以工作，以减少协调失败。 协调失败是影响许多组织的一个共同问题。 例如，一个人的薄弱努力可能会拖累整个团队的表现。 一条装配线的移动速度并不比最慢的人快，还是一份报告的移动速度？直到最后一个人完成他们的部分，才能完成。 具有潜在“薄弱环节”的组织容易陷入生产力陷阱，即所有个人都付出了很低的努力。 领导力是管理和促进向更好结果过渡的自然工具。 PI及其合作者对协调和领导之间的关系有着长期的兴趣。 先前的研究表明，有能力的领导者可以增加成功协调的几率，但强加于人的领导者并不是万能的。 成功的几率取决于领导者是谁，他们是如何被选中的，他们拥有的工具，以及他们如何行使领导力。 我们提出了三个项目，着眼于新的环境中，协调和领导是重要的，并检查以前未经测试的机制，使领导者更有效。 (1)集中管理与分散管理：考虑一家有两个部门的公司。 各部门可以通过协调各自的活动而获益，但每个部门都有关于世界状况的私人信息，而且关键的是，两个部门的利益并不完全一致。 是让一个中央管理者从各部门收集信息并将选择强加给各部门，还是让各部门共享信息并分别做出决策？ 集中化管理在很大程度上消除了各部门面临的协调问题，但却鼓励各部门歪曲其向中央管理者提交的报告，从而导致次优结果。Alonso，Dessein和Matouschek（2008）表明，在广泛的条件下，权力下放使公司利润最大化，但这一结果依赖于可能不切实际的行为假设。 该奖项资助了简化Alonso等人环境的实验，通过消除部门之间的信息不对称来对抗集中化。 PI推测，即使在对集中化有偏见的环境中，与理论相反，使用集中化管理的公司也会比使用分散化方法的公司表现更好。 (2)领导力和建议：想象一下，一群投资者独立选择是否将资金投入投资机会。 投资的回报取决于投资者的数量和未知的世界状态。 投资者从一位了解世界状况的顾问那里得到建议，但当投资者的最佳利益不高时，他有动机建议投资。 反复的互动迫使顾问将欺骗投资者的短期收益与维护信誉的长期关注相协调。 PI进行实验，以研究顾问是否可以成功地使用他们的上级信息，以产生协调的有效均衡。 他们计划将这一实验的结果与经济政策制定者在试图使一个国家摆脱目前影响美国的经济衰退时面临的一些问题联系起来。（三） 学习领导：领导者可以帮助团队克服协调失败。 尽管如此，许多有领导者的团体未能协调出一个有效的结果。 这不仅是因为运气不好，也是因为领导者犯了系统性错误。 因为具体的错误是可以识别的，所以如果坏领导者能够学习（或被教导）避免这些错误，他们就可以转变为好领导者，这似乎是合理的。 第三个项目使用经济实验来研究提高领导者绩效的可能方法：直接经验、间接经验和几种不同的建议。智力优势：了解领导者如何在各种环境中发挥作用是提高我们对组织如何实现有效协调的认识的核心。 除了扩大我们对领导力的了解之外，这里提出的研究还旨在改善制度设计和领导者培训，使生产率陷阱不太可能持续下去。预期更广泛的影响：协调问题在许多经济失败中起着重要作用。简而言之，经济可以是一个自我实现的预言。 如果人们认为经济会表现不佳，它就会表现不佳。 这里提出的工作旨在帮助领导者制定制度和战略，使其更容易摆脱生产率陷阱。 与拟议的研究开发的软件和技术应该是有用的各种经济学和商业课程的教学。 研究助理将接受宝贵的培训。