Management Practices Across Firms and Countries

By Nicholas Bloom, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen. 2012

696 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best managed. Firms in developing countries, such as Brazil, China and India tend to be poorly managed. American retail firms and hospitals are also well managed by international standards, although American schools are worse managed than those in several other developed countries. We also find substantial variation in management practices across organizations in every country and every sector, mirroring the heterogeneity in the spread of performance in these sectors. One factor linked to this variation is ownership. Government, family, and founder owned firms are usually poorly managed, while multinational, dispersed shareholder and private-equity owned firms are typically well managed. Stronger product market competition and higher worker skills are associated with better management practices. Less regulated labor markets are associated with improvements in incentive management practices such as performance based promotion.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/946dc59490a7679203d9dd7631c543340130b0f7

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Citations in the corpus

A dynamic capabilities-based entrepreneurial theory of the multinational enterprise (2014, unknown): “Source: Bloom et al. (2012). A capabilities-based theory of the MNE David J Teece”
Incomplete Contracts and the Internal Organization of Firms (2013, unknown): “Bloom et al. (2012b) find that firm size and plant size are both associated with a significant increase in their decentralization index.”
A capability theory of the firm: an economics and (Strategic) management perspective (2019, background): “Developing countries have a relatively large share of inefficient, poorly managed firms (Bloom et al., 2012).”
Team Incentives and Performance: Evidence from a Retail Chain (2015, unknown): “3 According to Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) and Bloom et al. (2012), Germany has one of the highest levels of managerial efficiency in the world, second only to the U.S.”
Operations management and the resource based view: Another view (2016, background): “…setting goals, having clear performance measures, rewarding high performers, and removing poor performers) associate significantly with firm performance; firms that apply these practices do better than firms that do not (Bloom et al., 2007; Bloom et al., 2012; Bloom and Van Reenen, 2006).”
How Do CEOs See Their Roles? Management Philosophies and Styles in Family and Non-Family Firms (2013, unknown): “As in Bloom et al. (2012a) we find that founder-run firms appear to have the weakest organizational management practices of all firm types in the sample, which may reflect a reliance on idiosyncratic management structures put in place by the founder.”
Management and Shocks to Worker Productivity (2019, unknown): “We add to this recent strand of work by showing one mechanism through which two important dimensions of managerial quality – monitoring (Bloom et al., 2012; Halac and Prat, 2016) and active personnel management (Aghion et al.”