Essays on the Organization of Work
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Tong-ditong-Management-2026-thesis.pdf
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3.84 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Tong, Di
Advisor(s)
Wilmers, Nathan
Date Issued
May 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This dissertation studies key aspects of work organization: how firms manage the workforce, design the task contents of jobs, and allocate tasks between workers. In three essays, I examine explanations for the variation and change in work organization and document its career consequences for workers.
Chapter 1 asks whether state-mandated minimum wage increases drive firms to modify non-wage management practices in three areas: schedule quality, investment in employees, and employee input. Applying difference-in-differences analyses to U.S.\ employee job reviews, I test competing predictions from compensating differentials theory, high-road strategy, and organizational inertia. Firms complying with wage mandates neither degrade non-wage job quality nor thoroughly upgrade management systems in the high-road direction. These findings underscore organizational inertia despite economic pressure to offset regulatory costs, revealing a decoupled relationship between wage-setting and non-wage management design.
Chapter 2 brings a firm-centric cultural perspective to the study of work design by documenting how the variation in task compositions and allocation across firms reflects gendered preferences associated with managers' political values. Using millions of LinkedIn worker task reports, contextual word embeddings, and voter registration records, I show that firms with a higher share of Democratic managers have more female-typed tasks and a smaller gender task difference, driven primarily by men performing fewer stereotypically masculine tasks. Managerial political leaning shapes how gender beliefs are ingrained into the deep structure of work itself---an arena often assumed to be apolitical and gender-neutral.
Chapter 3 examines whether performing more female-typed tasks at labor market entry leads to less long-term career growth. Tracking the career trajectories of 2.5 million U.S.\ workers over up to fourteen years using their LinkedIn profiles, I compare workers who initially entered the same occupation but differed in the gender typing of their job tasks in this entry position. Workers whose entry positions involved more female-typed tasks experience significantly less career rank growth, with the penalty falling disproportionately on women. These findings extend work devaluation from a static pricing phenomenon to a compounding career process, and reveal that the consequences of female-typed work arise not from the nature of the work alone but from its interaction with the gender of the worker.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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