Margit Osterloh

Career

Margit Osterloh graduated 1970 in industrial engineering and management at the Technische Universität Berlin. After six years of work in industry and after a scholarship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development she received her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1981 and her Habilitation in 1990 at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg under the supervision of Horst Steinmann.

Until her retirement in 2009 Margit Osterloh was Full Professor of Business Administration at the University of Zurich. 2010 - 2013 she was Full Professor of Management Science at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK and 2013 - 2015 Guest Professor at the Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, DE. Osterloh is currently Research Director at CREMA (Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts) in Zurich as well as Permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland, where she is a team member of CREW (Center for Research in Economics and Well-Being) at the Faculty of Business and Economics.

Margit Osterloh was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Leuphana University of Lüneburg. 2005 - 2011 she was a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities (Deutscher Wissenschaftsrat). Osterloh was member of the supervisory boards of several Swiss and German companies and is member of the University Council of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Research

Osterloh’s research areas include: Organizational Theory, Theory of the Firm, Innovation and Technology Management, Process Management, Knowledge Management, Trust Management, Philosophy of Science, Gender Economics, Corporate Governance, Research Governance, Migration Policy and Aleatoric Democracy. In the media she expresses her opinion on the following research topics:

Management Pay

Osterloh is advocates a cutback of bonus payments in upper management. She argues that pay for performance hampers creativity and intrinsic motivation.

Academic Rankings

In August 2012 Osterloh, together with Alfred Kieser, launched an appeal to other business professors to boycott the upcoming Handelsblatt Betriebswirte-Ranking (Handelsblatt Ranking of Professors in Business Economics). In various articles she argues, together with Alfred Kieser and Bruno S. Frey, against rankings and impact factors as a quality criterion for scholars in academia.

Women in leadership positions

Osterloh advocates quota and she also argues for partial random selection of women in leadership positions out of a carefully selected pool as a counter-measure to reduce women's, on average, higher aversion to competition versus men.

Migration issues

Margit Osterloh published, together with Bruno S. Frey, a much-noticed article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In analogy to the cooperative model, they propose that refugees acquire a share certificate of the state in order to enter the country. In return they get permission to work in the labor market. If a refugee is recognized as a political asylum seeker, the fee paid for the share certificate will be reimbursed. The currently inhumane and life-threatening defense against refugees and the exploitation by criminal traffickers is thereby reduced. Refugees receive a calculable perspective and incentives for integration. The proposal offers advantages for the countries of destination and origin, as well as for migrants.

Revival of controlled randomness as a decision-making mechanism

Together with Bruno S. Frey, Osterloh argues for a return to random or aleatoric elements such as those used in Classical Athens and up to Modern Age in numerous European communities. This improves - similar to quality circles in enterprises - the activation of knowledge, the engagement of the population, and results in a strengthening of participation as well as in a reduction of inequality dominance of the elites.