Building a Productive Workforce: The Role of Structured Management Practices

Christopher Cornwell, Ian Schmutte and Daniela Scur

Management Science, 2021, vol. 67, issue 12, 7308-7321

Abstract: In an influential study, Bender et al. [Bender S, Bloom N, Card D, Van Reenen J, Wolter S (2018) Management practices, workforce selection, and productivity. J. Labor Econom. 36(S1):S371–S409] document consistent relationships between management practices, productivity, and workforce composition using administrative data from German firms matched to ratings of their practices from the World Management Survey. We replicate and extend their analysis using comparable data from Brazil. The main conclusions from their study are supported in ours, strengthening the view that more structured practices affect organizational performance through workforce selection across different institutional settings. However, we find that more structured management practices are linked to greater wage inequality in Brazil, relative to greater wage compression in Germany, suggesting that some of the consequences of adopting structured practices are tied to the local context.

Keywords: industrial organization: firm objectives; organization and behavior; industrial organization: market structure; firm strategy; and market performance; labor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Building a productive workforce: the role of structured management practices (2019)
Working Paper: Building a productive workforce: the role of structured management practices (2019)
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