Management Practices and Organisational structures

Overview

There are large and persistent differences in organizational performance within detailed sectors that economists find very hard to explain. Traditionally, these differences have been ascribed to management quality, but most of the evidence here comes from case studies. As useful as this qualitative evidence is, there is a dearth of quantitative information on firm-level management practices across countries and sectors.

The objective of this strand of research is to fill this gap. Working with a leading management consultancy we have developed and conducted an in-depth new survey of management practices in over 4000 firms in 12 countries. We have aimed to:

Quantify the association of management practices with firm performance (productivity, market value, growth) controlling for a wide range of other factors
Look at the drivers of the adoption of managerial best practice. How important are managerial and workforce skills, ownership and governance, product market competition, labor market regulation or other government policies?
Analyze what accounts for the differences in these relations across countries. Does the UK really have a management problem? Are we a nation of David Brents?
Understand the relationship between work-life balance and firm performance. Do better management practices come at the expense of awful working conditions or are more effectively run firms able to treat their workers better ("work smarter not harder" in the jargon).
Develop theoretical developing models to understand how firms adjust their organizations in response to changes in their environment through devices like decentralization and delayering. Introductions to the work can be found at http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0722.pdf
Empirically, how is decentralization affected by social capital, uncertainty and technology?

View our press coverage related to management practices.

For further information contact John Van Reenen and Raffaella Sadun

Non-Technical Reports

Management Practice and Productivity: Why they Matter by Nick Bloom, Stephen Dorgan, John Dowdy, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

The Anglo German Foundation Report, Work Life Balance, Management Practices and Productivity by Nick Bloom, Toby Kretschmer and John Van Reenen is the result of joint research by CEP and the McKinsey Group. Published May 2006 by the AGF.

Work Life Balance, Management Practices and Productivity
by Nick Bloom, Toby Kretschmer and John Van Reenen

Management Practices across Firms & Nations
by Nick Bloom, Stephen Dorgan, John Dowdy, Tom Rippin and John Van Reenen

Management Practices, Work-Life Balance and Productivity: A Review of Recent Evidence by John Van Reenen and Nick Bloom, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 22 (4), 2006

Management Practices: The Impact on Company Performance by Nick Bloom, Centrepiece Article, Volume 10, Issue 2, Summer 2005.

Work in Progress

The 2006 healthcare and retail management surveys

During the Fall of 2006 a team of 3 MSc and PhD students ran around 250 interviews on public (NHS) and private hospitals in the UK to collect comparable data on management practices in the public and private sectors. This data is currently being analyzed with the first draft results planned for release in Summer 2007. Prior to this in Spring 2006 a small retail pilot on 21 UK retailers was carried out as an investigation into the feasibility of obtaining management and organizational survey data from service sector companies. The summary insights are available at the following link: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/textonly/research/productivity/management/summaryInsights.pdf

The 2006 manufacturing management and organization survey

During the Summer of 2006 a team of 45 MBAs and postgraduates at the Centre for Economic Performance surveyed over 3500 firms in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Greece, India, Japan, Korea and China, to collect data on management practices and organizational structures and behaviour. This data is currently being analyzed with first draft results planned for release in Summer 2007. The University research team involved in this project are Christos Genakos (Cambridge & CEP), Raffaella Sadun (LSE & CEP), and John Van Reenen (CEP & LSE).

Read the Non-Technical Summary (available from 12 July 2007)
Download the survey software, which contains all the data fields collected.
Download the interview guide and press cuttings used in the Summer survey.
Project Overview (for managers)
Project planning guide (PDF)
Some quotes (PowerPoint)

The 2006 Survey on Video:

View how the CEP Conference Room and CEP Library were transformed into an 'international call centre' working round the clock, 24 hours a day for the Summer 2006 Survey.

Summer 2006 Survey: Real Video (RV) For Real Video
Summer 2006 Survey: Video (AVI) For Windows Media Player

The 2004 manufacturing management survey

During the Summer of 2004 a team of 10 MBAs at the Centre for Economic Performance collected management data from around 750 medium sized manufacturing firms in the UK, US, France and Germany to measure and attempt to explain management practices across firms and nations. The results of this are written up in the paper entitled "Measuring and Explaining Management Practices across Firms and Countries" and "Work Life Balance, Management Practices and Productivity".

In Spring 2007 we plan to release a fully anonymized version of the CEP Management Stata dataset and programming files to allow researchers to replicate and extend this research.

This is funded by the Anglo-German Foundation, the Advanced Institute for Management and the ESRC.

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