  Complex organizations accomplish tasks through many steps of collaboration
among workers. Corporate culture supports collaborations by establishing norms
and reducing misunderstandings. Because a strong corporate culture relies on
costly, voluntary investments by many workers, we model it as an organizational
public good, subject to standard free-riding problems, which become severe in
large organizations. Our main finding is that voluntary contributions to
culture can nevertheless be sustained, because an organization's equilibrium
productivity is endogenously highly sensitive to individual contributions.
However, the completion of complex tasks is then necessarily fragile to small
shocks that damage the organization's culture.
