GOOD ECONOMY

Stop the crooks! The case for virtuous organisations



Margit Osterloh is a distinguished academic, business leader, and board member renowned for her significant contributions to the fields of management, gender and organizational economics, and corporate governance. She is celebrated for her unwavering commitment to corporate ethics and has been a steadfast critique of many prevalent modern corporate management practices. In our interview we explore how an undue focus on paying-for-performance can crowd out intrinsic motivation, how ranking and rating systems incentivize game-the-system behaviors, and how abolishing bureaucracy, when taken to extremes, can erode the "procedural utility" essential for ethical operations. Drawing on historical governance practices, such as "sortition", Margit shines a light on the organic emergence of justice and social order within institutions, and emphasizes the need to cultivate ethical character within the boardroom. Join us for a riveting discussion as we dissect the imperatives of ethical leadership in the contemporary corporate landscape, and explore why managers quickly turn from "so-called legends into crooks”.

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BEHIND the interview

Why is the interview important? Who are we talking to?

DISCOVERING THE DIALOGUE WITH

MARGIT OSTERLOH

Our decision to engage in a conversation with Margit was driven by her unwavering commitment to champion a humanistic approach to business and her ability to connect ethical principles with organizational and governance practices, both theoretically and practically. Our interest predominantly revolved around three core areas:

Firstly, Institutional Ethics: We were intrigued by Margit's expertise in institutional ethics and her specific focus on procedural fairness and utility.In our quest to construct an organizational model firmly rooted in ethical foundations, we sought to understand how institutions could effectively foster ethical (or trigger unethical) conduct within organizations. In this context, we wanted to gain insights intohow specific human resource practices influence intrinsic motivation and understand better how perceptions of institutional fairness could shape employees' discretionary efforts and organizational citizenship behavior.We were also keen to explore how various ethical frameworks, such as institutional ethics, Weber's ethics of responsibility, and discourse ethics, could facilitate the cultivation of organizational justice.

Secondly, Corporate Governance: this was our first discussion about corporate governance and we wanted to learn more about the effectiveness of supervisory board oversight and the impact of management remuneration. Margit's extensive personal experience and her unconventional ideas surrounding corporate governance, including proposals for restructuring board incentives, such as paying "boards like bureaucrats," implementing informed lotteries for board member selection, and emphasizing the significance of enabling controls, promised to offer fresh insights into how ethical leadership could be fostered both within organizations and through external governance structures.

Lastly, we wanted to draw upon Margit's extensive experience in the field of ethical university and business education. Margit had extensively critiqued new public management practices like peer reviews and rankings, and we wanted to discover new perspectives on how business schools and educational institutions could effectively instill ethical principles in the next generation of business leaders.

KEY LEARNING GOALS (click LIGHTBULB to see the INQUIRY MAP)

  • What is institutional ethics? How can enabling regulations support ethical conduct, both at societal and organisational level? What are the possible challenges?
  • What is Corporate Governance? What is the role of supervisory boards, and how effective are boards, based on empirical research? What are the challenges of high-powered board incentives?
  • What are examples of good practices for corporate governance, and what can we learn from the Benedictine monks, or Athenian democracy?
  • What are challenges with new public management?

✿ ABOUT MARGIT OSTERLOH


Margit Osterloh, born on 23 July 1943, is a distinguished German and Swiss economist, business leader and board member, known for her influential and pioneering work in the fields of human resource management, gender and organizational economics, research governance and corporate governance. She is Professor (em.) for Business Administration and Management of Technology and Innovation at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, and Permanent Visiting Professor at University of Basel. From 2010 to 2013 she held the role Professor of Management Science at Warwick Business School, UK.

In addition to her extensive research and publishing, Osterloh engages actively in contemporary political discussion, higher education and science governance. She is a Founder and Director of CREMA (Center for Research in Economics, Management, and the Arts), Member of the University Board of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and was a board member of three major companies in Switzerland and Germany. She was member of the «Deutscher Wissenschaftsrat» (German Council for Science and Humanities) until 2011 and President of the Equal Opportunity Commission of the University of Zurich (1996 – 2000). She received an honorary doctorate from Leuphana University, Lüneburg.

Osterloh's notable influence, and dedication to the advancement of ethical practices in both business and education have left a lasting impact on how modern corporate governance and management are perceived and practiced.


Exploring the Critical concepts for this session

 "Corporate governance describes the processes, structures, and mechanisms that influence the control and direction of corporations." This meta definition accommodates both the narrow definitions used in specific contexts and the broader descriptions that are often presented as authoritative. The latter include: the structural definition from the Cadbury Report, which identifies corporate governance as "the system by which companies are directed and controlled"; and the relational-structural view adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of "Corporate governance involves a set of relationships between a company's management, its board, its shareholders and other stakeholders.

Discourse ethics refers to a type of argument that attempts to establish normative or ethical truths by examining the presuppositions of discourse. The ethical theory originated with German philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, and variations have been used by Frank Van Dun and Habermas' student Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Jürgen Habermas is one of the leading social theorists and philosophers of the post-Second World War period in Germany, Europe, and the US, a prodigiously productive journalist, and a high-profile public intellectual who was at the forefront of the liberalization of German political culture. He is often labelled a second-generation Frankfurt School theorist, though his association with the Frankfurt School is only one of a rather complex set of allegiances and influences, and can be misconstrued. This entry will begin with a summary of Habermas’s background and early and transitional works, including his influential concept of the public sphere, before moving on to discuss in detail his three major philosophical projects: his social theory, discourse theory of morality (or “discourse ethics”), and discourse theory of law and democracy.

In industrial and organizational psychology, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is a person's voluntary commitment within an organization or company that is not part of his or her contractual tasks. Organizational citizenship behavior has been studied since the late 1970s. Over the past three decades, interest in these behaviors has increased substantially. Organizational citizenship behavior has been linked to overall organizational effectiveness, thus these types of employee behaviors have important consequences in the workplace.

Motivation crowding theory is the theory from psychology and microeconomics suggesting that providing extrinsic incentives for certain kinds of behavior—such as promising monetary rewards for accomplishing some task—can sometimes undermine intrinsic motivation for performing that behavior. The result of lowered motivation, in contrast with the predictions of neoclassical economics, can be an overall decrease in the total performance. The term "crowding out" was coined by Bruno Frey in 1997, but the idea was first introduced into economics much earlier by Richard Titmuss who argued in 1970 that offering financial incentives for certain behaviors could counter-intuitively lead to a drop in performance of those behaviors.

According to the ethic of responsibility, an action is given meaning only as a cause of an effect, that is, only in terms of its causal relationship to the empirical world. The virtue lies in an objective understanding of the possible causal effect of an action and the calculated reorientation of the elements of an action in such a way as to achieve a desired consequence. Free action consists of choosing the correct means. Weber prescribes an ethical integrity between action and consequences, instead of a Kantian emphasis on that between action and intention. According to the ethic of conviction, a free agent should be able to choose autonomously not only the means, but also the end. In this respect, Weber’s central problem arises from the recognition that the kind of rationality applied in choosing a means cannot be used in choosing an end. A free agent has to create purpose ex nihilo: “ultimately life as a whole, if it is not to be permitted to run on as an event in nature but is instead to be consciously guided, is a series of ultimate decisions through which the soul – as in Plato – chooses its own fate”.

People not only care about outcomes, they also value the procedures which lead to the outcomes. Procedural utility is a potentially important source of human well-being. This paper aims at introducing the concept of procedural utility into economics, and argues that it should be incorporated more widely into economic theory and empirical research. Three building blocks of a concept of procedural utility are outlined and it is suggested how procedural utility can be fruitfully integrated. Evidence from a broad range of social sciences is reviewed in order to show that procedural utility is a relevant concept for economics.

In governance, sortition (also known as selection by lottery, selection by lot, allotment, demarchy, stochocracy, aleatoric democracy, democratic lottery, and lottocracy) is the selection of public officials or jurors using a random representative sample. This minimizes factionalism, since those selected to serve can prioritize deliberating on the policy decisions in front of them instead of campaigning. In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.

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GETTING STARTED

A Resource Kit to launch your explorations

All newer papers (including grey papers) of Margit can be found in this collection of the CREMA research institute

We’ve talked about this since the financial meltdown. Now it’s time to do it: Unlink pay from performance. The evidence keeps growing that pay for performance is ineffective. It also may induce executives to take company-killing risks. There are other ways to motivate employees that yield better results at lower cost.

Employees are motivated intrinsically as well as extrinsically. Intrinsic motivation is crucial when tacit knowledge in and between teams must be transferred. Organizational forms enable different kinds of motivation and have different capacities to generate and transfer tacit knowledge. Since knowledge generation and transfer are essential for a firm's sustainable competitive advantage, we ask specifically what kinds of motivation are needed to generate and transfer tacit knowledge, as opposed to explicit knowledge.

We show theoretically and empirically that Pay-for-Performance, like many management fashions, has not achieved its intended aim. Our research focuses on previous empirical studies that examine the relation between variable executive pay and firm performance on various different dates. Our results indicate that a variable CEO income contributes very little to the increase of the firm’s performance, and that CEO salary and firm performance are not linked.

Hubris is a tendency of leaders to hold an overly confident view of their own capabilities and to abuse power for their own selfish goals, sometimes with disastrous consequences for organizations. A major reason for hubris is the rigorous selection process leaders typically undergo. This study proposes a governance mechanism used successfully in history to tackle hubris: partly random selections, which combine competitive selections by competence with lotteries

Background: Research rankings based on bibliometrics today dominate governance in academia and determine careers in universities. Method: Analytical approach to capture the incentives by users of rankings and by suppliers of rankings, both on an individual and an aggregate level. Result: Rankings may produce unintended negative side effects. In particular, rankings substitute the "taste for science" by a "taste for publication." We show that the usefulness of rankings rests on several important assumptions challenged by recent research.

Management research has long focused on the theory of the firm, studying for-profit organizations that produce privately owned resources based on central authority and within well-defined boundaries. In recent times, a new kind of enterprise has emerged that we call Community Enterprises. They are barrier free and extend beyond the reach of strong, personal relationships and are characterized by the production of appropriation-free resources and the absence of boundaries. Wikipedia is the most successful example of such a Community Enterprise. Assumptions and principles underneath related fields such as organizational
theory, innovation economics, and industrial organization should therefore be critically examined.

To overcome agency problems, public sector reforms started to introduce businesslike incentive structures to motivate public officials. By neglecting internal behavioral incentives, however, these reforms often do not reach their stated goals. This research analyzes the governance structure of Benedictine monasteries to gain new insights into solving agency problems in public institutions. A comparison is useful because members of both organizational forms, public organizations and monasteries, see themselves as responsible participants in their community and claim to serve the public good. This research studies monastic governance from an economic perspective. Benedictine monasteries in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and German-speaking Switzerland have an average lifetime of almost 500 years, and only a quarter of them broke up because of agency problems. The authors argue that they were able to survive for centuries because of an appropriate governance structure, relying strongly on the intrinsic motivation of the members and internal control mechanisms.

Decisions based on randomness are often taken to be “irrational” or “arbitrary”. The conventional strategy is to fight randomness; a more recent one is to accept and even celebrate randomness. We focus on a third approach that employs randomness as a managerial and social decision-making mechanism in a purposeful way. We ar- gue that Controlled Random Decisions provide considerable advantages. They allow outsiders as well as novel ideas to have an influence, and they work against corruption. When persons and projects are selected, there must be a careful pre-selection. Controlled Random Decisions should be discussed and employed more extensively.

Further essays and materials from other authors
In his famous lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’, Max Weber coined and elaborated on the antithesis between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility, which has had a far-reaching impact on the ethics discussions, particularly in German-speaking countries. The article explores what Weber himself meant with this distinction and what implications result from it. As an interesting historical observation, Weber's interpretation of ‘Do not resist an evildoer’ in the (Christian) New Testament is contrasted with Mahatma Gandhi's diametrically opposed interpretation. After criticizing Weber's position, the article outlines how today's business ethics can be based on a new and different foundation that overcomes the ‘profound antithesis’ between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility without disregarding the tensions between internal attitudes and external action results.

Many traditional conceptions of ethics use categories and arguments that have been developed under conditions of pre-modern societies and are not useful in the age of globalisation anymore. I argue that we need an economic ethics which employs economics as a key theoretical resource and which focuses on institutions for implementing moral norms. This conception is then elaborated further in the area of business ethics. It is illustrated in the case for banning child labour.

The fundamental tasks of integrative economic ethics are to critique ‘economism,’ including economic determinism and economic reductionism, as well as to rethink basic ethical aspects of economic reason. Pertinent issues include the meaning of economic
‘rationalization’ with regard to the good human life and the legitimacy of the politicoeconomic order with regard to a just and well-ordered society of free and equal citizens. The fundamental difference between ‘market freedom’ and ‘citizens' freedom’ has to be
pointed out, which amounts to the difference between economic and republican liberalism.

Fostering sustainable worker ownership and control of their organizations has long been an aspiration for many. Yet, the growth of worker-owned firms (WOFs) is often accompanied by organizational degeneration: the tendency for a small oligarchy of unrepresentative workers to control democratic structures at the expense of the participation of everyday workers. Prior research suggests that organizational degeneration occurs naturally as WOFs become larger and more complex. Building on and departing from this work, I argue in this essay that an important cause is likely to be current practice around how worker representatives are selected—specifically, the near-universal reliance on elections. As an alternative, I argue that the application of sortition.

This chapter provides an introduction and overview to the Handbook of Organizational Citizenship Behavior. It begins with a brief discussion of how organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) was traditionally defined and then explores the reasons why this concept has gained so much attention in the past three decades. Following this, we provide an overview of the Handbook. Specifically, the Handbook is organized into four sections: the history and meaning of organizational citizenship behavior; the consequences of OCB, the antecedents of OCB, and moving forward.

Selected published works

Interested in Leadership? Here is our Top 100 selection of the most important books for professional leaders of all times.


the socratic dialogue

Live video recording and podcasts

Explanations, artefacts and references from the interview

Women Shy Away From Competition – How To Overcome It (Crema Research)

Here is a popular TED video about sortition and what it meant for democracy in Athens - short and insightful

What have we learned? Our "Best Bit" takeaways from the Interview

KEY INSIGHTS FROM THE INTERVIEW FOR OUR INQUIRY

Here you can find the most memorable insights from our interview, related to our three inquiry questions. Simply select from the drop down menu on the right -->

Discourse Ethics Habermas; Problem of Implementation
  • I think the universal understanding is dependent on free communication, a communication without pressure. I admire Habermas very much, but in his philosophy, institutions do not play a role. And he doesn’t think about how institutions must be constructed so that this communication, as a form of powerless communication comes about. So, in reality, there is no powerless communication, but only communication which is not too much based on unilateral power.
Balancing the Ethics of Conviction and the Ethics of Responsibility
  • It was my job to reflect on how you can balance power on the one hand and free speech on the other hand. I could translate it into another vocabulary: we have to manage the tension between ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility. Or to be more precise with an ethics of consequences because that’s exactly what ethics of responsibility means. Humans, who are following their ethics of conviction will also have consequences of their behaviors in mind. This is where a possible tension between ethics of conviction and consequences originates. Hence we have to balance both sides of this tension. And that’s it. That’s a difficult thing in constructing organizational structures, all kinds of institutional structures, by the way in, in organizations as well as in society.

How to Craft Good Institutions/Institutional Ethics
  • People often do not behave like the “economic men”; in some situations, they behave like economic, but in many situations, they do not. And we must take that into account in our institution building theories, under which circumstances people behave, in which way. And we should embrace the findings, particularly on crowding-out, from psychology, or on voluntary cooperation from social psychology.
  • So I think we both agree that regulations are important. It is important how regulations are created, whether this is done in a democratic way or in a way which is not quite democratic, but gives a high degree of self determination inside of companies. So how rules are created? That’s the most important thing you know better than me that we have different kind of fairness — procedural fairness and outcome fairness. And we both probably are convinced that procedural fairness is the most important thing.

Better Corporate Governance
  • As you know, we have two different kinds of board systems. The German ones, where they are inside and outside directors, which has advantages and disadvantages. And the Swiss, UK and also American one where you have mostly inside directors, and I think — to be clear I prefer the German systems, that there are outside directors and that there are directors, which are elected by the employees, this comes closest to the idea of corporate governance, which I believe is good. And the background is that quite clearly that shareholder capitalism is not a good form of capitalism, because it’s not correct to say that only the capital owners should be presented at the highest level. And the reason why is, that it’s not only the shareholders who invest firm-specific. The idea, who owns a company is, that the owner of the company is the person who is dependent on the residual claim of the company on the profit, which cannot be contracted. And in former times, people thought and that’s the idea behind shareholder capitalism, that only shareholders invest in the company in a way which cannot be contracted ex ante. Today, we know that also employees, suppliers and other stakeholder invest in the company in this specific and not ex-ante contractable way. They invest their knowledge, tacit knowledge, and so on. And this is the reason why, today, I think the pure shareholder capitalism is out.

Aleatoric Democracy; Sortition as a Good Practice
  • Sortition is another expression for random selection, or lotteries. And lotteries have been applied for 1000s of years, for example, in ancient Athens. Aristoteles, by the way, thought that lotteries are the only real form of democracy, because their equality is 100%. To be honest, though, slaves and women were excluded. So, there you can again see what Zeitgeist means. But among male adults, the government was selected by lotteries, because lotteries have a lot of advantages. For example, they give a voice to those which are otherwise suppressed. And that’s an important thing for the applicants: How could you give stakeholders a fair voice? We have so many stakeholders, many more than we have shareholders. Let us assume a company has 5000 employees, X thousand customer and a lot of suppliers. This can easily sum up to 10 or 20,000 of stakeholders. So how to represent 20,000 stakeholders? You could do it by election, but election has a lot of disadvantages as well, in particular, that only the ones who have the biggest and the loudest voice are then elected. So, in this case only a random selection can enable a trust representation in the statistical sense. And that’s important, that is why sortition enables outsiders, newcomers, women, foreigners, migrants, to have a chance to have a voice at the highest level.
How to Organize for the Commons (and the Common Good)
  • Of course, to realize corporate commons, they are in principle two different ways. One is power / hierarchy. And the other, as Elenor Ostrom has taught us, is common-determination in small units. Yet this means the bigger the company, the more difficult it is to really manage this in small units. On the one hand, there is power, it could be managed from top down, how, let me say human resources should work. But you could also imagine that there is a strong spirit in the company, who tells you about principle of corporate governance, the bottom up, and again, you have to look for a mixture of both principles. Certainly the bottom up way, will produce a lot of transaction costs. So yeah, you have to look how in, in in reality, you put in practice, both principles.
Toxic Practices Preventing Good in Organisations (or Society)
  • I think rankings always have negative side effects, which means that people try to manipulate them, or concentrate only on the factors which are measurable and do not take care of the other factors. And we know very well, that sometimes the issues which are not very measurable are the more important ones. So, rankings in nearly every case are a bad thing.
  • But today in Wikipedia, there’s a lot of hierarchy. I have never contributed to Wikipedia, to be honest. But some people tell me that you cannot post anything there now as contributions are tightly controlled. And that might be the reason why unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t function as well as it did. Maybe you have realized as well that some articles are really not very informative. And the reason might be that this kind of hierarchy in effect at present doesn’t motivate people to contribute voluntarily, as was the case when it was more unstructured and democratic in the beginning.

On how universities need to change to become a force for the good again
  • To say it very short rankings, I think academic rankings contradict fundamentally the idea of scholarly work. To say it very clearly: rankings reduce scientific work to counting but in reality academic work should be about finding the better arguments. […] the effect of rankings is that people are more extrinsically motivated because they look at the ranking position, and they look less on the contents and I think that’s a big, big, big failure of our academic system today.

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diving deeper

Unleash your curiosity and discover new insights

✿ Good Life and Good Society

Further explorations about discourse ethics and communication as basis for democracy and social justice

Theory of Communicative Action

by Jürgen Habermas
Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics

Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics

by Jürgen Habermas
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement

by John Rawls
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

by Michael J Sandel

Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn

by Robert E. Goodin

Karl-Otto Apel und die Diskursethik: Eine Einführung

by Walter Reese-Schäfer

Beyond Civility: The Competing Obligations of Citizenship

by William Keith, Robert Danisch

✿ Good Organisations

Further tentative explorations about the theory and boundary of the organisation, and its resonsibility

The Theory of the Firm: An overview of the economic mainstream

The Theory of the Firm: An overview of the economic mainstream

by Paul Walker

Industrial Organization

by Oliver E. Williamson

The Economics of Transaction Costs

by Oliver E. Williamson & Scott E. Masten

Identity Economics

by George Akerlof & Rachel Kranton
The Theory of the Growth of the Firm

The Theory of the Growth of the Firm

by Edith Penrose
A Theory of the Firm – Governance, Residual Claims & Organizational Forms

A Theory of the Firm – Governance, Residual Claims & Organizational Forms

by Michael C Jensen

The Future of the Commons

by Elinor Ostrom
Business Ecosystems

Business Ecosystems

by Martin Reeves (Editor), Ulrich Pidun (Editor)

Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen

by James G. March

Rediscovering Institutions

by James G. March, Johan P. Olsen

Collaborative Entrepreneurship: How Networked Firms Use Continuous Innovation to Create Economic Wealth

by Raymond E. Miles, Grant Miles, Charles C. Snow

The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities For Prosperity

by Michael Piore, Charles Sabel

Bureaucracy, Collegiality and Social Change: Redefining Organizations with Multilevel Relational Infrastructures

by Emmanuel Lazega

Corporate Governance and Firm Organization: Microfoundations and Structural Forms

by Anna Grandori (Editor)

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