@TechReport{iza:izadps:dp8974,
            	author={Meier, Stephan and Stephenson, Matthew},
            	title={Culture of Trust and Division of Labor},
            	year={2015},
	month={Apr},
            	institution={Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)},
            	address={Bonn},
            	type={IZA Discussion Paper},
            	number={8974},
            	url={https://www.iza.org/publications/dp8974},
	abstract={Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. It has been thought since the time of Adam Smith that a firm's internal structure affects its productivity through the channel of gains from specialization. Our paper provides evidence of a link between an organization's culture – specifically the trust environment – and its internal structure.
We show experimentally that exogenously imposed culture endogenously leads to variation in organizational form. We prime trust using past performance from a pilot study and demonstrate that the level of trust within an organization affects division of labor and consequently organizational productivity. This evidence is consistent with a cross-country link between trust and the division of labor that we observe in data from the European Social Survey. Our results point to a mechanism that can help explain existing results on the connection between generalized trust and growth. It also points to an important determinant of a firm's internal structure: corporate culture (of trust).},
	keywords={organizational structure;division of labor;trust},
            }