Abstract
Delegation of autonomy to employees is an important job dimension for knowledge-intensive activities where the tasks are less routine and is scheduled and there is much room for creativity. Yet, it is not clear how delegation impacts the characteristics of innovative output especially at the project-level. In this article, we focus on innovative projects and discuss two main mechanism that autonomy impacts the innovative output through them; the effort mechanism and the control mechanism. Using a novel dataset based on a survey of inventors, we test our theory and find that delegation of autonomy increase the scientific value of the project, however its effect on the commercial value is mixed and often negative. Discussing the reasons why companies decide to bear this cost for delegation, we show that the impact of autonomy on commercial value also depends on the fit between the employee and the assigned project.
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