Eskalierendes Commitment gegenüber Mitarbeitern: Ein Rahmenmodell

Zusammenfassung:  Oft werden zus?tzliche Ressourcen in Mitarbeiter investiert, obwohl sie die in sie von ihren Vorgesetzten formulierten Erwartungen nicht erfüllen, und augenscheinlich die Trennung von ihnen die angemessene Entscheidung w?re. Ein solches Verhalten kann als „eskalierendes Commitment“ bezeichnet werden (Staw, 1997). In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, welche Konsequenzen es hat, dieses „Festhalten“ an wenig geeigneten Mitarbeitern tats?chlich als „eskalierendes Commitment“ zu beschreiben. Hierzu werden zum einen Erkenntnisse aus der bisherigen Forschung zum eskalierenden Commitment herangezogen, zum anderen werden ausgehend von Kernmerkmalen einer Arbeitsbeziehung vier weitere Faktoren diskutiert, die eskalierendes Commitment gegenüber Mitarbeitern verst?rken k?nnen: (1) Sympathie, (2) Prognoseungewissheit bzgl. des vermuteten Potentials des Mitarbeiters, (3) dem Mitarbeiter unterstellte Motivationsprobleme und (4) M?glichkeiten zur Reinterpretation der Anforderungen an den Mitarbeiter. Abschlie?end werden Deeskalationsstrategien diskutiert

Participation in Decision-making at the Plant Level: Reflections on the German Experience

Plant level participation because of its location offers larger opportunities to influence decisions than participation on the job but falls short of providing access to company decision arenas. Legal institutional regulations become important because of the specific characteristics of this kind of involvement in decision-making of dependent labor. Therefore the German Framework is described and discussed with democratic conceptual, social science and new institutional economics perspectives in mind. The findings show the restrictions of plant level participation but—at least for the German case—indicate that differences in interest tend to be expressed and modify decisions. An evaluation of effects on business activities nevertheless does not indicate systematic disadvantageous economic consequences, there might even be positive results in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.     

A Theory of Diversity

How can diversity be measured? What does it mean to value biodiversity? Can we assist Noah in constructing his preferences? To address these questions, we propose a multi‐attribute approach under which the diversity of a set of species is the sum of the values of all attributes possessed by some species in the set. We develop the basic intuitions and requirements for a theory of diversity and show that the multi‐attribute approach satisfies them in a flexible yet tractable manner. A natural starting point is to think of the diversity of a set as an aggregate of the pairwise dissimilarities between its elements. The multi‐attribute framework allows one to make this program formally precise. It is shown that the program can be realized if and only if the family of relevant attributes is well‐ordered (“acyclic”). Moreover, there is a unique functional form aggregating dissimilarity into diversity, the length of a minimum spanning tree. Examples are taxonomic hierarchies and lines representing uni‐dimensional qualities. In multi‐dimensional settings, pairwise dissimilarity information among elements is insufficient to determine their diversity. By consequence, the qualitative and quantitative behavior of diversity differs fundamentally.     

Preference for Flexibility in a Savage Framework

We study preferences over Savage acts that map states to opportunity sets and satisfy the Savage axioms. Preferences over opportunity sets may exhibit a preference for flexibility due to an implicit uncertainty about future preferences reflecting anticipated unforeseen contingencies. The main result of this paper characterizes maximization of the expected indirect utility in terms of an ‘Indirect Stochastic Dominance’ axiom that expresses a preference for ‘more opportunities in expectation.’ The key technical tool of the paper, a version of Möbius inversion, has been imported from the theory of nonadditive belief functions; it allows an alternative representation using Choquet integration, and yields a simple proof of Kreps' (1979) classic result.