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We introduce uncertainty into Holmstrom and Milgrom (1987) to study optimal long-term contracting with learning. In a dynamic relationship, the agent's shirking not only reduces current performance, but also increases the agent's information rent due to the persistent belief manipulation effect. We characterize the optimal contract using the dynamic programming technique in which information rent is the unique state variable. In the optimal contract, the optimal effort is front-loaded and stochastically decreases over time. Furthermore, the optimal contract exhibits an option-like feature in that incentives increase after good performance. Implications about managerial incentives and asset management compensations are discussed.

It is well known that high quality Undergraduate Research (UR) mentoring leads to better outcomes for faculty and students. In recent years, interest in the best practices faculty use for mentoring has increased. One pedagogical tool that has not received a lot of investigation is the use of Learning Contracts (LCs) within undergraduate research and how they might provide an equity-minded lens to this teaching context. We present initial insights from our colleagues on their current use of LCs in UR, as a starting point for thinking about how we can better support UR mentoring in ways that are inclusive to both mentees and mentors.

Social workers advance human rights and social and economic justice through their practice and policy work. The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) mandates that social work students develop knowledge, values, and skills in this area, as one of the core competencies of their professional training. This qualitative study analyzed learning contracts of four cohorts of BSW seniors ( n  = 114) to identify the stated activities for advancing human rights and social and economic justice through field education. Fifteen of these students also provided their understanding of the connection between their activities and this core competency. The findings revealed the types of activities that social work students engage in to develop and demonstrate readiness for practice. More than other core competencies, some students struggled to identify specific activities related to their practice setting, client population, or social work role. Implications for social work education and the implementation of CSWE’s 2015 Education Policy and Accreditation Standards are discussed.

Organizational forms involving more detailed contracts than are found in traditional spot market exchanges appear to be increasingly prevalent. There has been relatively little analysis, however, of the extent to which firms learn how to use contracts to manage their interfirm relationships over time. In this paper, we conduct a detailed case study of a time series of 11 contracts concluded during 1989–1997 between the same two partners, both of whom participate in the personal computer industry, to explore whether and how firms learn to contract. We find many changes to the structure of the contracts that cannot be fully explained by changes in the assets at risk in the relationship, and evidence that these changes are largely the result of processes in which the firms were learning how to work together, including learning how to contract with each other. The nature of this learning appears to have been quite incremental and local, that is, not very far sighted. We suggest how and when contracts might serve as repositories for knowledge about how to govern collaborations, and suggest some boundary conditions for this phenomenon. Our findings also provide implications for the debate about whether contracts have a positive or negative effect on interorganizational trust. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

An increasing volume of business activity appears to be occurring via alliances or other interfirm arrangements in which complex contracts are featured, yet there has been relatively little study of contract design in the strategy or management literatures. The economics literature on contracting has been extensive, but it has been less concerned with learning and evolution-phenomena in which strategy and organization scholars are deeply interested. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between two types of contractual provisions that are important in high-technology contracts, or contracts for which environmental uncertainty or technological complexity are significant, namely, contingency planning and task description. Previous research suggests that contracts can vary significantly in the degree of detail with which such key provisions are written, and that they are each subject to learning. In this paper, we find evidence from a sample of 386 contracts that contingency planning and task description behave as complements in contractual design. We argue that this complementarity reflects patterns of learning to contract. We also find that repeated exchange between two firms leads to greater effort at contingency planning in subsequent contracts, a finding that is also consistent with learning effects, but not with frequently made claims that contracts and trust are substitutes.

In this exploratory study of university–industry sponsored research agreements, we investigate how organizational roles direct the relational learning of contracting personnel, which subsequently influences contract evolution. Integrating theory with comments from field interviews, we posit that as scientists gain contracting experience with an exchange partner their focus of attention on knowledge creation supports the establishment of a relationship based on technical competence, behavioral experience, and operational routines that cause the enforcement terms of subsequent contracts to become less detailed. We also submit that contract administrators, because of their focus on knowledge protection (mitigating opportunism and enforcement), primarily accumulate joint governance experience and establish administrative routines that cause the enforcement terms of subsequent contracts to become more detailed. Rich content analysis of monitoring and intellectual property terms of sponsored research agreements supports our theoretically grounded hypotheses.

Purpose Workplace bullying is a serious problem among nurses, which results in negative workplace behavior. Therefore, this study aims to understand how workplace bullying affects employees’ knowledge hiding behavior. Specifically, this study explored psychological contract breach as an underlying mechanism between workplace bullying and knowledge hiding; and learning goal orientation as a boundary condition between psychological contract breach and knowledge hiding. Design/methodology/approach The study collected data from 343 nurses working in the health-care sector of Pakistan on convenience basis using a questionnaire-based survey between December 2021 to March 2022. The data were analyzed through structural equation modeling. Findings The results revealed the adverse effect of workplace bullying on knowledge hiding behaviors among nurses, and psychological contract breach was noted to mediate this association. Further, learning goal orientation was noted to buffer the relationship between psychological contract breach and knowledge hiding. Research limitations/implications The cross-section design may restrict causality; however, the findings suggest health-care administration take appropriate measures to reduce the adverse effects of workplace bullying. In addition, the administration is suggested to implement training programs to make nurses capable of dealing with workplace stressors (bullying and psychological contract breach). Originality/value This research provides a novel perspective to consider psychological contract breach as a mechanism between workplace bullying and knowledge hiding in the health-care sector from the conservation of resources perspective. It further explored learning goal orientation as a buffer to mitigate the effect of psychological contract breach on knowledge hiding.

Purpose Knowledge loss caused by employee exit has become a significant corporate risk. This paper aims to explore how to measure the impact of knowledge loss. The paper is based on empirical evidence from a five-year longitudinal study. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on a longitudinal change project for a large Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant in the period 2008-2013. The method was a single case study using a critical realism paradigm. The project was a transformational change programme which aimed to help make the partner organization a learning organization to minimize the impact of knowledge loss. The partner organization was a large Australian Government Department, which faced the threat of knowledge loss caused by its ageing workforce. The sample was 118 respondents, mainly engineering and technical workers. A total of 150 respondents were invited to participate in the study which involved an annual survey and attendance at regular training workshops and related activities, with a participation rate of 79 per cent. Findings The results found that knowledge loss has most negative impact in terms of organizational problems including low productivity (morale), strategic misalignment of the workforce (capability gaps), resource cuts (stakeholders unhappy with performance), decreased work quantity and quality (inexperienced employees), work outputs not being used (customers mistrust), longer time to competence (learning cost) and slow task completion (increased search cycle time). The second most significant impact was increased sense of risk associated with work activities and declining capacity to manage the risk. The third main impact was decreased organizational knowledge base: knowledge loss creates knowledge deficit which is unlikely to be filled over time, as shown by the knowledge accounts of surviving employees which remained stable overall. The two remaining measurement constructs – psychological contract and learning organizational capacity – improved, which suggests that the negative impact of knowledge loss may be addressed with appropriate knowledge management. Research limitations/implications The research is based on a single case study in a public sector organization. While the longitudinal nature of the study and the rich data collected offsets this issue, it also presents good opportunities for researchers and practitioners to test the ideas presented in this paper in other industry contexts. The complexity and range of the constructs, concepts and scale items is acknowledged. Tables have been used wherever possible to help the reader access the findings. Practical implications Knowledge loss is perhaps the greatest corporate risk facing organizations today. This paper provides a method to measure the impact of knowledge loss. Managers may use this to assess the significance of the risk and use this as a business case to take action to minimize the impact of knowledge loss. Originality/value Prior research has found knowledge loss has caused decreased psychological contract, lost organizational memory, inefficiency and ineffectiveness and declining capability; however, these concepts are discussed in broad terms only. This paper addresses the need for measurement concepts which helps us understand the nature of the impact of knowledge loss. Five knowledge loss concepts are developed: knowledge resources, psychological contract, learning organization capacity, risk management and organizational problems. The results are based on a large-scale longitudinal study providing empirical evidence of change over a three-year period, situated within the context of a research intervention, i.e. knowledge management programme.

Employee contracts often allow for managerial discretion, such that the manager decides after observing an employee's performance how that employee will be rewarded or penalized. Importantly, the effects of such evaluation outcomes can extend beyond the employee(s) directly affected, because such outcomes can be observed by other employees within the firm. The net effect of such vicarious learning as an indirect control depends on the inferences employees make after observing a peer's evaluation outcome. In this study, we use an experiment to investigate whether the inferences observer-employees make about how managers evaluate and reward employee behavior depend on whether the valence of the observed outcome is positive or negative. Using the setting of a strategic performance measurement system, we test and find support for a causal model, in which the valence of the observed outcome influences observer-employees' inferences and subsequent behavioral focus via their psychological distance from, and their construal of, the observed outcome. Our results suggest that how observeremployees respond after observing a peer employee's evaluation outcome is asymmetric. Specifically, when contemplating their own behavior, employees who observe positive outcomes focus on the performance measures within the strategic performance measurement system, whereas those who observe negative outcomes focus on the underlying strategic construct.