Images of Coordination: How Implementing Organizations Perceive Coordination Arrangements

Coordination Neglect: How Lay Theories of Organizing Complicate Coordination in Organizations

We argue that organizations often fail to organize effectively because individuals have lay theories about organizing that lead to coordination neglect. We unpack the notion of coordination neglect and describe specific cognitive phenomena that underlie it. To solve the coordination problem, organizations must divide a task and then integrate the components. Individuals display shortcomings tha...

Status and Coordination in Organizations∗

Firms can motivate workers by offering them social status. Much of the literature argues that a rise in status is a powerful work incentive while ignoring its impact on coordination. However, when workers need to collaborate while having individual vested interests, too large a difference in status distorts how workers coordinate, i.e., one worker compromises too much with respect to his most p...

Working Paper Alfred P. Sloan School of Management Modelling Coordination in Organizations Modelling Coordination in Organizations

Implementing Automatic Coordination on Networks of Workstations

Distributed shared objects are a well known approach to achieve independence of the memory model for parallel programming. The illusion of shared (global) objects is a convenient abstraction which leads to ease of programming on both kinds of parallel architectures, shared memory and distributed memory machines. In this paper, we present several different implementation variants for distributed...

Observability and Overcoming Coordination Failure in Organizations

Motivated by problems of coordination failure in organizations, we examine how overcoming coordination failure and maintaining coordination depend on the ability of individuals to observe others’ choices. Subjects’ payoffs depend on coordinating at high effort levels in a weak-link game. Treatments vary along two dimensions. First, subjects either start with low financial incentives for coordin...