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我时，发生了一种特别困难和重要的变化。对于这样的公司来说，成功的转型可以决定公司能否在股东利润和员工安全都依赖于结果的情况下生存下来。因此，了解如何最有效地扭转濒临倒闭的公司是一个具有重大经济意义的话题。使这种转变更加复杂的是，行为和期望的协调变化的需求通常存在于广泛不同的管理人员和员工群体中。直观地说，这就像改造一支橄榄球队的传球游戏——如果四分卫一直把球扔过他们头顶10码，签下NFL历史上最伟大的接球手也无济于事。引用一个著名的企业转型案例研究，改变公司的努力需要“立即、同时”（Knez和Simester， in press）。在本研究中，我们研究了如何在一个公司内最有效地进行这种协调的变革，以及如何使由此产生的改进永久化。为了检验这些问题，我们计划使用受控的实验室实验来研究公司的周转。这样的实验是对企业转型的实地研究的有价值的补充，因为它们使我们能够看到一个严格控制的环境，在那里我们可以很容易地观察到变化的所有可能原因。我们的实验着眼于一个小型模拟公司的表现。使用一个简单的环境，我们首先把实验公司推到一个表现不佳的情况。企业员工在低努力水平上协调，导致低生产率，对企业和员工都产生低回报。关键的是，存在着员工在更高的努力水平上协调，生产率显著提高，企业和员工都获得更高回报的替代情况。我们的研究集中在两个问题上。首先，企业如何才能最有效地摆脱困境，进入良好的状态？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例子。第二，公司内部代理人的行为是否表现出足够强的历史依赖性，以至于即使在影响变化的机制被移除后，向更好情况的转变也能保持下去？例如，假设一个好的结果受到了激励薪酬大幅增加的影响。公司能否提高激励性薪酬，而不让员工重蹈覆辙？

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?