The paper investigates the relationship between mission congruence and the reliance on incentives and delegation of decision making, using a dataset on 206 childcare centers. We find that mission congruence between childcare teachers and employers is negatively related to the likelihood of reliance on financial incentives and positively related to teacher autonomy. These results support the idea that worker preferences play an important role in the design of organizations.

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This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of an under-explored consequence of granting autonomy to workers: monitoring. In the principal-agent model that we develop, granting autonomy allows workers to carry out innovative tasks in the workplace. Given that innovative tasks are more difficult to monitor, the model predicts a positive relationship between autonomy and monitoring. Relying on information about blue-collar workers coming from a dataset ofSpanish industrial plants, we provide strong support for this prediction.

Theoretical debate suggests at least three strategies for firms to provide training to employees in the same job position: individualized and egalitarian with or without adaptation to the abilities of the recruited employees. The article provides a formal framework for deriving distinctive empirical implications regarding the relationship of these strategies with the firms’ selection policies, which are tested using a dataset of blue-collar workers in Spanish industrial plants. The evidence is consistent with the empirical implications of the egalitarian strategy with adaptation. This strategy entails providing the same level of training to all workers in the same job position and setting this level according to the average ability of recruited workers. Paradoxically, this strategy has not been used to interpret the results of the existing empirical literature. JEL CLASSIFICATION M53; M54; M21; J24