Oliver Baumann

Oliver Baumann

Professor of Strategy and Organization Design, University of Southern Denmark

About me

Curriculum Vitae (December 2025)

I am a Professor of Strategy and Organization Design at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), where I lead the Strategic Organization Design research unit at the Department of Business and Management. I am also affiliated with the Digital Democracy Center.

My research explores the architecture of adaptation: how organizations design structures and decision processes to learn and innovate in uncertain environments. I treat organizations as complex adaptive systems, using computational modeling (NK landscapes, reinforcement learning), experiments, field studies, and digital trace data to understand how formal design interacts with human behavior.

My current work focuses on three distinct organizational contexts:

  1. Traditional hierarchies: How performance feedback shapes search. I examine how individuals interpret and report information, revealing the role of social comparison in driving experimentation and the paradoxical benefits of “sugarcoating” bad news.

  2. Human-AI systems: How structures adapt to algorithmic influence. I investigate how decision rights evolve when AI augments human judgment, and how platform dominance reshapes news ecosystems and democratic discourse.

  3. Decentralized networks: How coordination emerges without hierarchy. I explore Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) as socio-technical systems, investigating the possibilities and limits of replacing managerial authority with algorithmic code.

I am a co-editor of the Journal of Organization Design and serve on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Discoveries, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. My research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management, Organization Science, the Strategic Management Journal, and other outlets.

I received a PhD in Business Economics from LMU Munich, an MS in Industrial Engineering and Management from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and an MS in Engineering Management from Portland State University. Before joining SDU, I was an Assistant Professor at LMU Munich and a visiting scholar at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.