worker cooperatives have positive impacts on both firm productivity and employee welfare; there is a lot more research showing that worker ownership is modestly better than regular capitalist ownership

This is causal language, but as far as I can tell (at least per the 2nd paper) the studies are all correlational? By default I'm very skeptical of ability to control for confounders in a correlational analysis here. Are there any studies with a more robust way to infer causation?

How would you expect EA WSDNs to differ from current EA orgs concretely?

When it comes to worker cooperatives, I see the differences as all flowing from reducing conflicting interests. That is, in standard firms, owners are ultimately interested in profits and only instrumentally interested in working conditions while workers are ultimately interested in working conditions (broadly construed) and only instrumentally interested in profits. Worker cooperatives resolve this tension by making agents principals and principals agents.

This is an idealization, but it seems like the interests of all relevant actors in EA orgs (and nonprofits more generally?) are more aligned. The board and the workers are (at least in theory) largely (if not solely) motivated by the same do-gooding goal.

I do not have experience with WSDNs but based on your description, the Czech Association for EA seems to have this model. The structure is such that people sign up to be members, members elect leadership and leadership reports back to the members.

The biggest difference seems to be that our members are not only employees but volunteers or general supporters.

My experience with organizational design is that the formal structure tends to follow not lead the informal structures that arise among the people in the organizations. Yes, over time organizations become "ossified" such that the formal structure also creates the informal structure, but this is not much the case in early and small orgs, although there are usually some exceptions to this as certain formal relationships develop early, such as the founder(s) or some other persons having authority via legal and financial control that backs their ability to influence others and hence seeds the creation of the org structure.

Overall this is to say my guess is these sorts of structures are either already naturally arising and where they don't it's because there are other incentives that push those organizations in other directions.

---

That's one way to explain my thinking. Another is this:

I read your post as suggesting something like "hey, what if we tried this different org structure; I think it might be better", but to actually try a different org structure you have to have people who want to relate to each other in a different way. It's typically only at large orgs with ossified structures where people are not relating to each other in the way they would like and where suggesting a change of org structure might manage to shift an equilibrium by getting everyone to re-coordinate towards something they prefer.

In a small org you probably can't make the structure much other than what it is unless you first change the people who are creating the structure to be the kind of people who would create the desired structure. That's because I expect the existing structure to already be a natural equilibrium that is roughly correlated with the kind of structure desired proportional to the amount of (official) control each person in the org has. Thus unlike in a large org there is not a hope that you can hit reset and get a different outcome by breaking the existing inadequate equilibrium.