The Importance of Incentives in Organizational Structures

In organizational structures, there are incentives that influence how subordinate actors communicate with their superiors. These incentives include risk avoidance, threat inflation, and settling scores. Bureaucrats may be motivated to seek out information that supports the leader and deliver biased accounts. Insular structures and division of labor also affect the flow of information, with bureaucrats often transmitting what they think the leader wants to hear. This creates an intelligence game where the true state of the world is overlooked. It is important to consider these incentive structures in national security and foreign policy decision making.