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，会发生一种特别困难和重要的变化。 对于这样的公司，执行一个成功的转变可以决定公司是否生存与股东利润和员工安全的结果。 因此，了解如何最有效地挽救濒临破产的公司是一个具有重大经济意义的话题。 使这种转变复杂化的是，行为和期望的协调变化往往存在于广泛不同的管理者和员工群体中。 直觉上，这就像改造一个足球队的传球游戏-签署了最伟大的宽接收器在NFL的历史上不会帮助，如果四分卫继续扔球十码以上的头。 引用一个著名的公司转型案例研究，改变公司的努力需要“立即和立即”（Knez和Simester，出版中）。 在这项研究中，我们将探讨如何在整个公司范围内最有效地进行这种协调变革，以及如何使由此产生的改进成为永久性的。为了研究这些问题，我们计划使用受控实验室实验来研究公司转型。 此类实验是对企业扭亏为盈的实地研究的宝贵补充，因为它们使我们能够审视严格控制的环境，在那里我们可以轻松观察到所有可能的变革原因。 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，我们首先将实验公司推入一个表现不佳的情况。 公司员工在低努力水平上进行协调，导致生产力低下，为公司和员工带来低回报。 重要的是，存在其他情况下，员工协调更高的努力水平，生产力显着提高，公司和员工都获得更高的回报。 我们的研究集中在两个问题上。 第一，企业如何才能最有效地摆脱困境，进入良好的状态？ 可能的工具，我们计划研究包括在公司的员工激励制度的变化，改善公司内部的沟通，并提供高性能的外部例子。 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，即使在用于影响变化的机制被移除后，向更好的情况的转变也能保持？ 例如，假设一个好的结果受到激励性薪酬大幅增加的影响。 公司能在不让员工回到以前的非生产性工作方式的情况下提高激励性工资吗？

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?