An Empirical Framework for Testing Theories About Complimentarity in Organizational Design
An Empirical Framework for Testing Theories About Complimentarity in Organizational Design
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DOI：
10.3386/w6600
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发表时间：
1998-06
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
S. Athey;Scott Stern
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
S. Athey;Scott Stern
本文研究了在横截面企业中评估组织设计实践对绩效的影响的替代经验策略，以及决定组织设计的因素。我们的经济模型建立在一家企业的基础上，在该企业中，多种组织设计实践都是由内部决定的，而这些组织设计实践通过“组织设计生产功能”来影响产出。计量经济学模型包括每种做法的成本和回报中未观察到的外生变化。该模型被用来评估在关于经济和统计环境的不同假设下，如何解释用于检验互补性理论的不同计量经济学战略。我们确定了关于不可观测对象联合分布的可信假设，在这些假设下，与现有文献不同的几种方法将产生有偏见和不一致的估计。我们发现，偏差的标志取决于两个因素：组织设计实践是否是互补的，以及每个实践的未观察到的回报之间的相关性。我们找到了几组可以确定偏差符号的条件，并提供了经济解释。我们的分析表明，对于一组特定的假设，各种不同的程序都可能产生定性上相似的偏差，这给互补性的识别带来了挑战。然后，我们提出了一种结构化的方法，它基于描述生产力和组织设计实践需求的联立方程系统。只要观察到与未观察到的实践回报无关的外生变量，就能识别结构参数，产生互补性的一致性检验以及组织利润函数静态优化所隐含的交叉方程限制。
This paper studies alternative empirical strategies for estimating the effects of organization design practices on performance, as well as the factors which determine organizational design, in a cross-section of firms. Our economic model is based on a firm where multiple organizational design practices are en endogenously determined, and these organizational design practices affect output through an 'organizational design production function.' The econometric model includes unobserved exogenous variation in the costs and returns to each of the individual practices. The model is used to evaluate how different econometric strategies for testing theories about complementarity can be interpreted under alternative assumptions about the economic and statistical environment. We identify plausible hypotheses about the joint distribution of the unobservables under which several different approaches from the existing literature will yield biased and inconsistent estimates. We show that the sign of the bias depends on two factors: whether the organzational design practices are complements, and the correlation between the unobserved returns to each practice. We find several sets of conditions under which the sign of the bias can be determined, and we provide economic interpretations. Our analysis shows that for a particular set of hypotheses, a variety of different procedures may all yield qualitatively similar biases, presenting a challenge for the identification of complementarity. We then propose a structural approach, which is based on a system of simultaneous equations describing productivity and the demand for organizational design practices. As long as exogenous variables are observed which are uncorrelated with the unobserved returns to practices, the structural parameters are identified, yielding consistent tests for complementarity as well as the cross-equation restrictions implied by static optimization of the organizatin's profit function.