LANGBEIN, Laura I <br/><br/>
Ownership, empowerment, and productivity :  some empirical evidence on the causes and consequences of employee discretion 

 -  2000 
<br/><br/> This paper uses a sample of professional engineers employes in the public and private sector to investigate the effect of sector employment, indicators of task complexity, organization size, number of rules, importance, and attentiveness and agreement among various principals (custumers or clients, peers, mid- and top-level management, and politicians) on both employee discretion and a subjective measure of employee productivity. The results show that disagreement  among important and attentive proximate principals (mid-level managers) expands discretion, but disagreement among important and attentive distant principals (top executives and politicians) reduces discretion. Sector has no direct  or indirect effect on discretion. When customers or clients and peers are imporrtant and attentive principals, discretion increases, and so does productivity. Monitoring by mid-level management has no effect on productivity. Because disagreement among distant principals is greater in the public sector, devolution of authority alone is unlikely to increase public sector productivity