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Attitude change in arbitrarily large organizations

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  • Luis Almeida Costa
  • Joao Amaro de Matos

Abstract

The alignment of collective goals and individual behavior has been extensively studied by economists under a principal-agent framework. Two main solutions have been presented: explicit incentive contracts and monitoring. These solutions correspond to changes in the objective situation faced by individuals. However, an extensive literature in social psychology provides evidence that behavior is influenced, not only by situational constraints, but also by attitudes. Therefore, an important aspect of organization is to choose the structures and procedures that best contribute to the dissemination of the desired attitudes throughout the organization. This paper studies how the initial configuration of attitudes and the size of the organization affect the optimal organizational structure and the timing of information flows when the objective is to align the members' attitudes. We identify and characterize three factors that affect the optimal organizational structures and procedures and the degree of alignment of attitudes: (1) clustering effects; (2) member cross-influence effects; and (3) leader cross-influence effects.

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  • Luis Almeida Costa & Joao Amaro de Matos, 2013. "Attitude change in arbitrarily large organizations," Nova SBE Working Paper Series wp579, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Nova School of Business and Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:unl:unlfep:wp579
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    Keywords

    Organizational structure; timing of information flows; attitude change; influence;
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