Subjective Confidence as a Monitor of the Replicability of the Response

Confidence is commonly assumed to monitor the accuracy of responses. However, intriguing results, examined in the light of philosophical discussions of epistemic justification, suggest that confidence actually monitors the reliability of choices rather than (directly) their accuracy. The focus on reliability is consistent with the view that the construction of truth has much in common with the construction of reality: extracting reliable properties that afford prediction. People are assumed to make a binary choice by sampling cues from a "collective wisdomware," and their confidence is based on the consistency of these cues, in line with the self-consistency model. Here, however, I propose that internal consistency is taken to index the reliability of choices themselves-the likelihood that they will be repeated. The results of 10 studies using binary decisions from different domains indicated that confidence in a choice predicts its replicability both within individuals and across individuals. This was so for domains for which choices have a truth value and for those for which they do not. For the former domains, differences in replicability mediated the prediction of accuracy whether confidence was diagnostic or counterdiagnostic of accuracy. Metatheoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.

The Dual Function of Organizational Structure: Aggregating and Shaping Individuals’ Votes

How do organizational structures influence organizational decision making? This article reveals organizational structures’ dual function: they both (1) aggregate and (2) shape individuals’ decisions. What makes this dual function so remarkable is that the two effects are diametrically opposed to one another. Ceteris paribus, a less stringent decision-making structure reduces the amount of support required for a given project to be greenlit at the organizational level, which should result in more investments getting approved. However, we find that this ceteris paribus assumption does not hold, because a less stringent decision-making structure also reduces individuals’ tendency to provide their support for an investment. Our experimental investigation of organizational voting provides evidence for our position that organizational structure plays an important role beyond mere aggregation: voting thresholds also affect individuals’ voting behavior. The combination of both effects explains why the organizational adoption of a new voting threshold may not yield the intended outcome.

Funding: This work was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award from the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences [Grant 1943688] granted to O. Schilke.

Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1653 .

The Mechanisms and Components of Knowledge Transfer: The Virtual Special Issue on Knowledge Transfer Within Organizations

Knowledge transfer within organizations has important implications for organizational performance and competitive advantage. In this virtual special issue, we review articles on this topic published in Organization Science between 2014 and 2020 and identify 53 articles for their theoretical and empirical contributions. These articles examine knowledge transfer through five transfer mechanisms: social networks, routines, personnel mobility, organizational design, and search. We consider the intersection of each transfer mechanism with important components of knowledge transfer (characteristics of sources/recipients, characteristics of knowledge, and characteristics of contexts). We present 15 exemplar articles, each of which reflects the intersection of a mechanism and a component of knowledge transfer. We also present an overview of the methodological approaches and empirical contexts that are utilized. We conclude our article with a discussion of future research opportunities. The articles published in Organization Science have advanced understanding of both the mechanisms through which knowledge transfer occurs and the conditions under which it is most likely.

Effects of Social Information on Risk Taking and Performance: Understanding Others’ Decisions vs. Comparing Oneself with Others in Short-Term Performance

When a problem leaves decision makers uncertain as to how to approach it, observing others’ decisions can improve one’s own decisions by promoting more accurate judgments and a better insight into the problem. However, observing others’ decisions may also activate motives that prevent this potential from being realized, for instance, ego concerns that prompt excessive risk taking. Our experimental study investigates how two features of the social environment influence the effect of observing others’ decisions on individual risk taking and performance. We manipulated (1) the psychological distance to others whose decisions could be observed (and thereby the tendency to seek self-enhancing social comparison) and (2) the opportunity for interaction (and thereby for a cumulative effect of any such tendency on decisions over time and for an effect on social information itself). Because the two features covary in real-world settings, we designed two treatments corresponding to the two natural combinations. Both treatments provided participants with two other participants’ period decisions in a multiperiod problem under uncertainty. No new objective information about the problem could be inferred from these decisions. We predicted that participants who observed the decisions of distant others (who had solved the same problem earlier) would perform better than participants in a control sample without any information about others’ decisions and that participants who observed the decisions of proximal others (with whom interaction could arise) would take more risk and perform worse than those who observed distant others’ decisions. The data corroborate our predictions. We discuss implications for organizational learning.