Information technology, organizational change and firm productivity: A panel study of complementarity effects and clustering patterns in Manufacturing and Services

Fardad Zand, Cees Van Beers and George Leeuwen

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Organizational complementarities are an essential factor in the process of creating business value from information technology (IT) investments. Organizational change (OC) is an important complementarity. This paper investigates complementarities between IT capital and OC initiatives of the firm. It analyzes the productivity impact of different clusters of IT and OC in the manufacturing and services sectors of the economy. Three dimensions of OC are studied: process, structure, and boundary changes. Two distinct econometric approaches are applied to a unique and detailed sample of 32,619 firm-level observations in the Netherlands for the period 1994-2006. The results reveal that the productivity effect of IT significantly increases when technology investments are accompanied by relevant organizational changes. The observed complementarity effects between IT and OC are stronger for services than for manufacturing firms. The effects become stronger if different types of change are combined with each other and form clusters. In contrast to IT capital, non-IT capital and OC exhibit a substitutability relationship. As to another finding of the research, IT seems to play a dual role with respect to change: generating or stimulating it and complementing or supporting it. The first role is more dominant among manufacturing, while the second is among services firms.

Keywords: Information Technology; Organizational Change; Firm Productivity; Complementarities; Clusters; Manufacturing; Services. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D2 D22 L2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-11-30
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/46469/1/MPRA_paper_46469.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:46469

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().