Abuse of Authority and Hierarchical Communication

Abstract

If managers and their subordinates have the same basic qualifications, then organizations can benefit from replacing unproductive superiors with more productive subordinates.In response to this threat, superiors may deliberately recruit unproductive subordinates, or abuse their personnel authority in other ways, in order to protect themselves.We show that the common practice of requiring intra-firm communication to pass through a "chain of command" can be an effective way of securing the incentives for superiors to recruit and develop the best possible subordinates.We discuss alternative ways to prevent the abuse of authority and general implications of our analysis for organizational design.We also present supporting evidence from the literature on human resource management and organizational behavior.