Corporate Turnarounds: An Experimental Examination

几十年来，组织变革一直是经济学和管理学学者感兴趣的话题。当表现不佳的公司试图重塑自己时，就会发生一种特别困难和重要的变化。对于这样的公司来说，成功的扭亏为盈可以决定公司能否在股东利润和员工安全取决于结果的情况下生存下来。因此，理解如何最有效地扭转濒临倒闭的公司的颓势，是一个具有重大经济意义的话题。让这种转变变得复杂的是，对行为和期望的协调改变的需求往往存在于广泛不同的经理和员工群体中。直观地说，这就像是修改了一支足球队的传球方式--如果四分卫一直把球扔过他们头顶10码，那么签下NFL历史上最伟大的边路接球手也无济于事。引用一个著名的企业扭亏为盈的案例，改变公司的努力需要立即和全部(Knez和Simester正在出版)。在这项研究中，我们研究了如何才能最有效地在整个公司范围内进行这种协调的变化，以及如何使由此产生的改进成为永久性的。为了检验这些问题，我们计划使用受控实验室实验来研究公司的扭亏为盈。这些实验是对企业扭亏为盈的实地研究的宝贵补充，因为它们让我们能够观察一个严格受控的环境，在这个环境中，我们可以很容易地观察到所有可能的变化原因。我们的实验考察了一家小型模拟公司的业绩。使用一个简单的环境，我们首先将实验公司推入其表现不佳的情况。公司员工的努力程度很低，导致生产率低下，给公司和员工带来的回报都很低。关键的是，存在其他情况，员工在更高的努力水平上进行协调，生产力显著提高，公司和员工都能获得更高的回报。然后，我们的研究集中在两个问题上。首先，公司如何才能最有效地摆脱糟糕的处境，并转移到良好的境地？我们计划研究的可能工具包括改变公司对员工的激励制度，改善公司内部的沟通，以及提供高绩效的外部榜样。其次，公司内部代理人的行为是否表现出足够强的历史依赖性，以至于即使在用来影响变化的机制被移除后，仍能保持向更好情况的转变？例如，假设一个好的结果通过大幅增加激励性薪酬而受到影响。该公司能否在不让员工退回到原来的非生产性方式的情况下，增加激励性薪酬？

For decades, organizational change has been a topic of interest for scholars in economics and management. A particularly difficult and important sort of change occurs when under performing firms attempt to reinvent themselves. For such firms, executing a successful turnaround can determine whether the firm survives with both shareholder profits and employee security riding on the outcome. Understanding how to most efficiently turn around failing companies is therefore a topic of great economic import. Complicating such turnarounds, a need for coordinated changes in behavior and expectations often exists across widely diverse groups of managers and employees. Intuitively, this is like revamping a football team's passing game - signing the greatest wide receivers in the history of the NFL won't help if the quarterback keeps throwing the ball ten yards over their heads. To quote one well-known case study of a corporate turnaround, efforts to change the firm need to be 'right-away and all at once' (Knez and Simester, in press). In this study we examine how such coordinated changes across a firm can be made most effectively, and how the resulting improvements can be made permanent.To examine these questions, we plan to use controlled laboratory experiments to study corporate turnarounds. Such experiments serve as a valuable complement to field studies of corporate turnarounds because they allow us to look at a tightly controlled environment where we can easily observe all the possible causes of change. Our experiments look at the performance of a small simulated firm. Using a simple environment, we first push the experimental firm into a situation where it is performing poorly. Firm employees are coordinated on low effort levels, causing low productivity and producing low payoffs for both the firm and the employees. Critically, there exist alternative situations in which employees coordinate on higher effort levels, productivity is dramatically increased, and both firm and employees earn higher payoffs. Our study then focuses on two issues. First, how can the firm most efficiently be extricated from its bad situation and moved to a good situation? Possible tools we plan to examine include changes in the firm's incentive system for employees, improved communication within the firm, and the provision of high performing external examples. Second, does behavior by agents within the firm display sufficiently strong history dependence that a shift to a better situation can be maintained even after the mechanisms used to affect the change are removed? For example, suppose a good outcome is affected through a large increase in incentive pay. Can the firm increase the incentive pay without employees sliding back to their old unproductive ways?