Revisiting the Strategy, Structure, and Performance Paradigm: The Case of Venture Capital

Noam Wasserman ()
Additional contact information
Noam Wasserman: Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Organization Science, 2008, vol. 19, issue 2, 241-259

Abstract: The strategy-structure-performance (SSP) paradigm has developed a central role within strategy research. However, recent critiques of the paradigm have called for research that uses more appropriate measures of strategy and structure, inductive methods that enable richer exploration of the paradigm, and extension of the paradigm to the expert-focused organizations that have grown in importance since the paradigm was first developed. This paper answers this call by integrating inductive methods with quantitative analysis of a unique panel data set of 317 professional services firms (PSFs) to find new measures of strategy and to understand their linkages to organizational structure within such firms. It shows how the core knowledge required for decision making and the coordination challenges in these firms drive their internal structures and that the degree of strategy-structure fit has important performance implications for those firms.

Keywords: strategy and structure; professional services firms; venture capital; performance implications; organizational structure; knowledge-intensive firms; integrating qualitative and quantitative methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1070.0309 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:19:y:2008:i:2:p:241-259

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().