We explore how cooperation is produced, maintained, and made complicit in organizations. Across four empirical studies, we move from how individual employees understand cooperation in their own words, to what structural and cultural conditions predict it, to how it is built and sustained in a project-based consulting team, to how it turned complicit in four major banks during the 2007-08 financial crisis. Drawing on Joint Production Motivation Theory and Goal Framing Theory, applied empirically for the first time across multiple settings, we find that organizational culture consistently drives cooperation more than formal structure, though structure plays an important supporting role. People cooperate not because roles are clear or incentives are well designed, but because shared purpose feels meaningful and relationships are trustworthy. At the same time, cooperation is not inherently good. It can become fragile, strained, or worse, complicit in harm, sustaining organizations in the short term while quietly destroying them from within. Cooperation, we argue, is not a stable organizational feature. It is a fragile achievement, continuously produced, and dependent on the conditions surrounding it.

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PhD

MSc Sayoni Santara

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- other

Supervisor

Prof. dr. Rafael Wittek

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- other

Supervisor

Dr. Liesbet Heyse

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- other

Supervisor

Prof. dr. Lisa Herzog

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- other

• Philosophy
• Sociology

• Governmental policymakers
• HR managers
• Managers
• Organisation science
• Philosophy
• Policy advisors
• Sociology

• Work

• Feedback Cycles

• Reconciling stakeholder interests

The dissertation is anchored in Joint Production Motivation Theory (JPMT) (Lindenberg & Foss, 2011), which provides the overarching framework across all four studies. JPMT argues that cooperation arises when organizational conditions activate individuals' motivation to contribute to joint production, tasks whose outcomes depend on the coordinated efforts of multiple people. The theory identifies two sets of conditions that sustain this motivation: structural arrangements such as task interdependence, role clarity, reward systems, and authority structures, and cultural arrangements such as shared vision, normative signaling from leaders, and the reinforcement of guiding causes. The motivational logic driving JPMT draws on Goal Framing Theory (Lindenberg & Steg, 2007), which holds that behavior in any situation is guided by whichever of three goal frames is most cognitively salient: the normative frame, oriented toward collective obligation and appropriate behavior; the gain frame, oriented toward individual material benefit; and the hedonic frame, oriented toward immediate gratification. The normative frame is inherently the weakest and most fragile. Sustaining cooperation therefore requires organizational conditions that continuously keep it in the foreground. When those conditions erode, gain or hedonic orientations take over, and cooperation either weakens or, as the complicit cooperation study shows, continues in service of harmful goals. The complicit cooperation study extends this framework by combining JPMT with Cultural Slope Theory (Herzog, 2018), which explains how organizational cultures erode gradually from within. A cultural slope begins when individual behaviors that deviate from professional norms are not corrected but instead legitimized and normalized through leadership signaling and peer reinforcement, triggering a cascade of further norm violations that progressively degrade the shared belief system holding an organization together. While JPMT explains the individual-level motivational processes through which this happens, Cultural Slope Theory captures the organizational-level cultural dynamics that result. Together they trace the full chain from governance failure at the macro level to complicit cooperation at the individual level and organizational decay at the societal level. The remaining studies draw on additional theoretical perspectives in a supporting role. The relational coordination study draws on Relational Coordination Theory (Gittell, 2002), which argues that effective coordination in fluid and high-interdependence settings depends on the quality of relationships among those doing the coordinating, and on practice-based approaches to organizational culture (Schein, 2010; Fine, 1984), which hold that cooperative cultures are produced through repeated everyday practices rather than formal value statements. It also draws on normative control and identity theory (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Alvesson & Kärreman, 2007) to understand how structural investments in consulting firms serve as mechanisms of cultural formation as much as coordination. The relational foundations study and the structural and cultural antecedents study draw more broadly on the sociological literature on cooperation, including social exchange theory (Blau, 1964), cultural approaches to meaning-making in work (Weick, 1995; Wrzesniewski, Dutton & Debebe, 2003), and organizational culture research (Hofstede, 1980; Schein, 2010), to situate the empirical findings within wider debates about how shared norms, relational trust, and collective purpose shape cooperative engagement. Across all four studies, social mechanism reasoning (Habersang et al., 2019; Felin, Foss & Ployhart, 2015) guides the analytical logic, connecting individual-level motivational processes to collective organizational outcomes rather than relying on variable-based statistical explanation alone.

The dissertation adopts a multi-method research design that combines qualitative, quantitative, and case-based approaches across four empirical studies. This design was chosen deliberately to capture cooperation at different levels of organizational life and through different forms of empirical evidence, recognising that no single method could address all four research gaps. The relational foundations study takes an inductive qualitative approach. Open-ended survey responses from 380 employees across 26 countries were analysed using thematic coding in ATLAS.ti, allowing themes to emerge from participants' own language without imposing predefined categories. This approach was suited to the study's aim of understanding how employees themselves define and experience cooperation. The structural and cultural antecedents study uses the closed-ended portion of the same global survey dataset and applies quantitative cross-sectional regression analysis. Structural and cultural organizational conditions are treated as predictors of three forms of cooperative behaviour, tested simultaneously within the same model to assess their relative explanatory weight. This is the first systematic empirical test of the JPMT framework. The relational coordination study uses a qualitative case study design, drawing on semi-structured interviews with eleven consultants in a Dutch consulting division. Interviews were supplemented by a visual mapping exercise in which participants traced perceived cooperation levels across the trajectory of a typical project. Data were analysed thematically using ATLAS.ti, with coding focused on organisational practices, cooperation experiences, temporal fluctuations, and positional differences across hierarchical roles. The complicit cooperation study uses post-failure document analysis, drawing on inquiry reports, regulatory investigations, books by insiders and journalists, and academic articles on four major banks during the 2007-08 financial crisis. Analysis combined deductive coding derived from JPMT and Cultural Slope Theory with inductive coding to allow additional organisational aspects to emerge from the data. Within-case analyses of each bank were followed by cross-case comparison. Across the four studies, the selection of sectors and national contexts was deliberate. The survey data spans multiple countries. The consulting case introduces a Dutch professional service context. The banking study focuses on the United Kingdom and United States, where governance failures were extensively documented. This variation allows examination of cooperation across different institutional and organisational environments, strengthening the generalisability of the overall findings.

NWO Gravitation Grant

024.003.025