Information Technologies, Communication Technologies and Decision-Making: Experimental and Survey Evidence

We test whether (i) Information Technologies (IT) increase the autonomy of employees to take decisions and (ii) Communication Technologies (CT) shift decisions from lower to higher decision levels with the consequences of staff facing more help requests from employees. Combining experimental data and survey data, we find that information technologies help agents to solve more problems and that communication technologies conduct agents to rely more on the principal. We deepen our analyses by investigating the impact of IT and CT on production. We find that individual production of agents is higher for those using IT. Receiving problem to solve disturbs the principal and reduces his/her production level. Regarding team production, our experimental results show that it increases with information technologies and decreases with communication technologies.