Studies on organizational design, value congruence, and ownership

This thesis consists of three related studies investigating the issues of organizational design, value congruence and ownership. The first study examines the difference in a series of key organizational design elements between nonprofit and for-profit organizations. The second study examines the impact of person-organizational value congruence on several key elements of organizational design and organizational performance. The third study examines an individual-level phenomenon: how do employee occupational status and organizational ownership type influence the relationship between employee value congruence and job attitudes.;Organizations are complex systems consisting of individuals with different goals and interests. Coordinating individual behavior is thus the focal task of organizations. Organizations use formal design as an effective tool to obtain coordination. They can also rely upon individual intrinsic motivation to achieve the same goal. Among the main themes of the present thesis is to investigate the interplay between formal organizational design and individual intrinsic motivation.;Organizational ownership status reflects differences across organizations in objective, principal-agent relationship and employee selection. It also represents collectively employees' values system. Ownership status influences profoundly organizational behavior including designing the internal structure and the pattern of individual behavior within organizations. Two aspects are of particular interest in the present studies: first, how does ownership status impact the pattern of organizational design, and second, how does ownership status influence the relationship between employee value congruence and job attitudes.;The third layer of the present research endeavor is occupational influence on the pattern of individual behavior. Occupation status reflects collectively the individual values system due to shared educational, professional and social backgrounds. Examining the relationship between employee value congruence and job attitudes along the occupational dimension enhances the understanding of the effect of value congruence on employee attitudinal and behavioral outcomes across different types of employees.;Empirical evidence is drawn upon a multi-level and multi-source dataset consisting of information from an organizational survey, individual employee survey and regulatory database of nursing homes in Minnesota. Results from statistical and regression analyses provide consistent support to the hypotheses.