World Management Survey Research Articles

Management practices in facilities providing HIV services to key populations in Kenya and Malawi: A descriptive analysis of management in community-based organizations.

HIV services for key populations (KP) at higher risk of HIV infection are often delivered by community-based organizations. To achieve HIV epidemic control, countries need to scale up HIV services for KP. Little is known about the management practices of community-based organizations delivering health services. We explored the management practices and facility characteristics of community-based health facilities providing HIV services to key populations as part of the LINKAGES program in Kenya and Malawi. We collected information on management practices from 45 facilities called drop-in centers (DICs) during US Government FY 2019, adapting the World Management Survey to the HIV community-based health service delivery context. We constructed management domain scores for each facility. We then analyzed the statistical correlations between management domains (performance monitoring, people management, financial management, and community engagement) and facility characteristics (e.g., number of staff, organization maturity, service scale) using ordinary least square models. The lowest mean management domain scores were found for people management in Kenya (38.3) and financial management in Malawi (25.7). The highest mean scores in both countries were for performance monitoring (80.9 in Kenya and 82.2 in Malawi). Within each management domain, there was significant variation across DICs, with the widest ranges in scores (0 to 100) observed for financial management and community involvement. The DIC characteristics we considered explained only a small proportion of the variation in management domain scores across DICs. Community-based health facilities providing HIV services to KP can achieve high levels of management in a context where they receive adequate levels of above-facility support and oversight-even if they deliver complex services, rely heavily on temporary workers and community volunteers, and face significant financial constraints. The variation in scores suggests that some facilities may require more above-facility support and oversight than others.

Safe Surgery Checklist Implementation: Associations of Management Practice and Safety Culture Change.

Designing and developing safe systems has been a persistent challenge in health care, and in surgical settings in particular. In efforts to promote safety, safety culture, i.e., shared values regarding safety management, is considered a key driver of high-quality, safe healthcare delivery. However, changing organizational culture so that it emphasizes and promotes safety is often an elusive goal. The Safe Surgery Checklist is an innovative tool for improving safety culture and surgical care safety, but evidence about Safe Surgery Checklist effectiveness is mixed. We examined the relationship between changes in management practices and changes in perceived safety culture during implementation of safe surgery checklists. Using a pre-posttest design and survey methods, we evaluated Safe Surgery Checklist implementation in a national sample of 42 general acute care hospitals in a leading hospital network. We measured perceived management practices among managers (n = 99) using the World Management Survey. We measured perceived preoperative safety and safety culture among clinical operating room personnel (N = 2,380 (2016); N = 1,433 (2017)) using the Safe Surgical Practice Survey. We collected data in two consecutive years. Multivariable linear regression analysis demonstrated a significant relationship between changes in management practices and overall safety culture and perceived teamwork following Safe Surgery Checklist implementation.

Investment, inflation, and the role of internal information systems as a transmission channel

We examine whether the quality of firms' internal information systems influences the relation between inflation shocks and corporate investment, as posited by imperfect information models. Inconsistent with RBC models’ prediction that nominal variables (e.g., inflation) do not affect real variables (e.g., corporate investment) but consistent with the presence of information frictions, we first document a positive relation between inflation shocks and firm-level investment. Next, we show that higher internal information system quality, measured through responses to the World Management Survey, mitigates the positive relation between inflation shocks and firm-level investment. This result suggests that internal information quality serves as a channel through which aggregate-level nominal variables affect firm-level real variables. We then document that firms with higher internal information system quality make relatively more efficient investment decisions following inflation shocks. Our inferences are robust to using the 8th EU Company Law Directive as a shock to internal information system quality and to several additional tests.

Revisiting the World Management Survey in Strategy: Applications to Theory and Replication

The academic field of strategy has a strong history of developing theories and frameworks to explain real-world phenomena but a relatively younger empirical literature testing these theories. Partly because of the nature of questions in strategic management, scholars have often relied on collecting their own data or using specialized, and often expensive, proprietary data. This limits the possibility of replication exercises, which are a key step to refining and reinforcing the theories that are most supported in practice. To support this effort, we revisit the World Management Survey: a crosscountry, crossindustry survey data set with over 20,000 observations at the establishment level that is collected through a rigorous and well-documented process and made free and accessible to researchers. Although it is not without influence in the strategy literature, we propose that it is underused and that better exposure to these data’s offerings has the potential to add significant value to the field. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/stsc.2022.0006 .

Management practices in hospitals: A public-private comparison.

We use information on management practices in 1,183 hospitals in 7 different countries, collected in 2010 within the "World Management Survey" initiative, to estimate the role of public ownership on different management dimensions, such as monitoring performance, setting targets and incentivizing employees. A significant variation in management practices both between countries and, within countries, across hospitals is found. We show that managers in public sector hospitals tend to underperform, relative to private hospitals, in all the countries considered. Larger hospitals appear to be better managed, while there is no difference between teaching and other type of hospitals. Publicly owned hospitals appear less efficient in the provision of incentive schemes to promote and reward highly motivated employees, or remove poor performers. Overall, public ownership is associated with a reduction of about 10% in management score, which corresponds approximately to a half-standard deviation.

A validated survey to measure Chinese hospital management practices

Surveys are widely used to assess hospital management with the aim of understanding differences in management practices. However, survey measures with prior notice can make hospitals change their routine practices and are unable to reflect the actual hospital management level. The World Management Survey (WMS) methodology has been developed to ameliorate these issues. It uses a double-blinded method and open-ended question design. The Chinese Hospital Management Survey (CHMS) project is the first to adapt the WMS methodology in China, which it uses to measure hospital management level in 510 hospitals. This paper provides an instrument to better measure actual management practices, which makes it possible to compare the management level of hospitals in China and other countries.

The key success factors to adopting lean practices: the case of South American manufacturing firms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that promote the successful adoption of lean practices in manufacturing firms operating in developing economies in South America.Design/methodology/approachBased on the results obtained from using structural equation modeling to analyze the collected data, the authors argue that manufacturing organizations need to identify the factors that assist in successfully adopting lean practices in manufacturing firms operating in developing economies in South America. A dataset of 1,809 responses, gathered from manufacturing firms as part of the World Management Survey, was used to find support for the proposed hypotheses.FindingsSeveral hypotheses were tested finding that lean practice success factors such as organizational targets proved to have a significant and positive relationship with the mediating factor, performance management. Likewise, performance management was also found to have a significant and positive relationship with lean practices adoption. Human capital management (HCM) has a significant but negative predictive relationship with lean practices.Research limitations/implicationsThe empirical results of this study provide valuable managerial insights. The results are therefore limited to the economies analyzed and to the variables surveyed as part of the World Manufacturing Survey research.Practical implicationsThe results of this research provide a starting point for researchers to continue studying the key lean practice factors and relationships in the achievement of improved performance management, thereby helping managers in developing strategies to improve the lean capabilities of their practices. This, in turn, will increase the organization's competitive advantage sustainably.Originality/valueThis paper identifies and tests the impact of key factors on successful lean practices adoption in South American organizations in the manufacturing sector.

Managerial Contracting: A Preliminary Study

AbstractImportant types of contractual relationships—among them those between integrated product manufacturers and their suppliers—are neither fully transactional nor fully relational. The agreements that govern these relationships incorporate highly detailed written terms that focus not only on what is promised but also on the details of how it is to be achieved and how suppliers’ actions will be monitored and responded to over the life of the agreement. Together with the implicit relational contracts that support their operation, these provisions create an economic hybrid that lies between markets and hierarchies, a set of relatively standard institutional arrangements that give buyers the right (but not the obligation) to exercise a package of quasi-integration rights that enables them to obtain many of the most important benefits of vertical integration while simultaneously reaping most of the core benefits of outsourcing. The contract provisions used to govern these relationships are termed here “managerial provisions” because they employ the techniques of intra-firm hierarchy that managers use to organize relationships and increase productivity within firms. This article focuses on a subset of these provisions, namely those that are analogous to the eighteen management practices that the World Management Survey (WMS) reveals are closely associated with persistent performance differences across similarly situated enterprises. After documenting the convergence between these practices and the terms of procurement contracts, the article suggests that the contract governance regime these practices create is well designed to support the creation and maintenance of cooperative relationships, strengthen the force of network governance, and scaffold the emergence of the type of inter-firm process-based trust that is associated with better supplier performance. More generally, this article concludes that in the modern economy, where the value of so many types of contracts—from research and development alliances to business process outsourcing agreements and beyond—depends on employees of the contracting entities working together much as if they worked for a single firm, lawyers would be well advised to look to the broad array of managerial techniques successfully used within firms (not only those based on WMS practices) to develop new ways to better govern transactions between firms.

Skills, management practices and technology adoption in Greek manufacturing firms

The Greek economy has so far failed to shift its production structure towards more complex, high value-added activities incorporating knowledge-intensive practices. Greece lacks a systemic “activating knowledge” dimension. Given the country’s low performance in innovation and knowledge diffusion relative to EU peers, we focus on two specific problem areas of Greek industry: skills and management practices. Both areas are key requirements to achieve robust productivity growth, in which Greece has been shown to be chronically lagging behind its peers. First, we provide an in-depth look at skills indicators to identify the scope for action, particularly in addressing mismatch. A novel result is that, by utilising mismatch indicators aggregated from microdata sourced from the recent OECD Survey of Adult Skills that was conducted as part of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), we show that Greece has the highest overskilling for professional occupations. We also corroborate previous findings about the negative relationship between skills mismatch and firm productivity. Second, we use firm-level data from the World Management Survey to give a review of management practices in Greek industry and explore the quality of these practices and their association with productivity. Finally, we use information from a novel survey on entrepreneurship, technological developments and regulatory change, and examine structural characteristics of innovation activity and technology adoption by Greek firms, with a focus on the role of size, ownership structure, global value chain participation and human resource practices. Our empirical findings provide valuable input into concrete policy proposals to increase productivity in Greek manufacturing.

How to improve SME performance using iterative random forest in the empirical analysis of institutional complementaritty

Empirically investigating the workings of institutional complementarity in organisations has been a challenge in the social sciences domain for a long time. This paper examines data from the World Management Survey (WMS) using a new machine learning method termed as iterative random forest (iRF), which is used in the field of biostatistics. An empirical study of complementarity was conducted in small and medium-sized enterprises using WMS data. The effects of 18 management quality indicators on profitability, growth and viability were examined using machine learning methods (i.e. random forest [RF] and iRF). The analysis revealed the relative importance of whether high performers are properly rewarded, poor performers are reassigned and retrained and the criteria for high and low performance are well established. Furthermore, the study results revealed that the ability to set short-term goals based on a long-term perspective is complementary to many other indicators. These findings are consistent with the findings of a survey study that examined many empirical studies on the workings of institutional complementarity. This indicates that iRF is a credible and promising method for empirical research on institutional complementarity.

Hospital management practices in county-level hospitals in rural China and international comparison

BackgroundAlthough management is important in healthcare, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have little experience measuring the competence of hospital management. While improving hospital management is the main focus of hospital reform in China, few studies have empirically documented the baseline situation to inform policy design.MethodsWe assessed the management practices of county-level hospitals in Guizhou in southwest China during 2015. We used the Development World Management Survey (D-WMS) instrument to interview 273 managers in 139 hospitals. We scored the management practices of the sampled hospitals, overall and in four dimensions (operations, monitoring, targets, personnel management) and three processes (implementation, usage, monitoring). We then converted the scores to the WMS scale and compared these with data from two other LMICs and seven high-income countries (HICs).ResultsOn a scale of 1 (‘worst practice’) to 5 (‘best practice’), the mean (SD) hospital D-WMS scores were 2.57 (0.46) overall; 2.71 (0.48), 2.64 (0.58), 2.40 (0.64), and 2.56 (0.40) for operation, monitoring, target, and personnel, respectively; and 2.43 (0.48), 2.62 (0.48), and 2.66 (0.47) for implementation, usage, and monitoring, respectively. After conversion to WMS scores, China ranked seventh of 10 countries, after six HICs and higher than one HIC and two other LMICs (Brazil and India). China ranked higher than the two LMICs in each of the four dimensional scores.ConclusionsChinese county-level hospitals should improve their low quality of management by prioritizing target-setting and process implementation, particularly in personnel management. Meanwhile, modern management training should be given to most clinical managers.

Medical disputes and patient satisfaction in China: How does hospital management matter?

Satisfaction with healthcare may be captured by surveys of patients and staff, or in extreme cases, the number and severity of medical disputes. This study tries to investigate the relationship between satisfaction and hospital management as well as the role of good management in preventing medical disputes ex ante. We investigate this relationship using information on management practices collected from 510 hospitals in mainland China using the World Management Survey questionnaire and combined with medical malpractice litigation data and patient/staff satisfaction surveys. Multiple regression models were used to analyse the relationship between hospital management scores and medical litigation outcomes as well as patient and staff satisfaction during 2014-2016. An increase of one standard deviation in the management score was related to 13.1% (p<0.10) lower incidence of medical disputes, 12.4% (p<0.05) fewer medical litigations, and 51.3% (p<0.10) less compensation. Better management quality of hospitals was associated with higher inpatient satisfaction (p<0.05) and staff well-being (p<0.01). Improving hospital management could reduce hospital costs generated by lawsuits, reduce potential harm to patients, and improve patient and staff satisfaction, thus leading to a better patient-physician relationship.

Building a Productive Workforce: The Role of Structured Management Practices

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. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.

How universal is WMS? A contextual analysis of the relationship between people management practices

The World Management Survey (WMS) initiative has collected firm-level data in more than 35 countries for the cross-country measurement of management quality. Abundant research shows that management quality is a good and universal predictor for productivity. However, firms’ environments differ from each other substantially. The purpose of our study is to critically examine whether the people management dimension in WMS, as an important dimension of management quality, is equivalently associated with productivity across countries. We do so by investigating the association between people management and labour productivity in varying contexts of cultural values and labour markets in 14 countries. Our results confirm earlier findings that people management significantly relates to labour productivity. More importantly, we do not find any moderating contextual effects of culture or labour market characteristics on the relationship between people management and productivity, suggesting that the best practices of people management that WMS offers seem to be valid across countries with different cultural values and labour market characteristics. Therefore, we offer valuable insights into the debate of convergence versus divergence of management practices across the globe.

Safe Surgery Checklist Implementation: Associations of Management Practice and Safety Culture Change

Safety culture, shared values with regard to safety management, is a key driver of high-quality health care delivery. The Safe Surgery Checklist (SSC) is an innovative tool for improving surgical care safety, but evidence about SSC effectiveness is mixed. While a structured implementation and management commitment are considered important, limited evidence exists about what managerial practices support safety culture, and how SSC implementation can impact the organization’s managerial practices and safety culture. We examined the relationship between management practices and perceived safety culture and the way checklist implementation induces change in both. Using a pre-posttest design and survey methods, we evaluated the implementation of SSC in a national sample of 42 general acute care hospitals affiliated with a leading hospital system. We measured perceived management practices among management (n=99) using the World Management Survey. We administered the Safe Surgical Practice Survey to clinical operating room personnel to measure perception of pre-operative safety and safety culture (N= 2380 in 2016 and N= 1433 in 2017). Data was collected in two consecutive years. Linear regression analysis demonstrated a significant relationship between changes in management practices and overall safety culture and perceived teamwork following SSC implementation.

Management in education systems

Abstract There is increasing interest in measuring management in schools. This paper discusses a popular measurement tool: the World Management Survey (WMS) for schools. Drawing on WMS data, secondary sources, and the recent literature on school management, we take stock of the WMS and make recommendations for its use in future research and policy. We conclude that the WMS remains a highly useful tool for its stated purpose—the standardized measurement of (a subset of) management practices within schools—and make two sets of recommendations. First, we encourage those seeking to benchmark management practices in schools to take a systems perspective by extending the WMS approach upwards into the education bureaucracy. Second, when measuring practices within schools, we recommend that researchers consider: how best to assess alignment across practices in the operations domain; the challenge of measuring student learning for monitoring and target-setting; and the context specificity of people management.

The World Management Survey at 18: lessons and the way forward

AbstractUnderstanding how differences in management ‘best practices’ affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics, and public policy. The World Management Survey (WMS) project was born almost two decades ago with the main goal of developing a new systematic measure of management practices being used in organizations. The WMS has contributed to a body of knowledge around how managerial structures, not just managerial talent, relate to organizational performance. Over 18 years of research, a set of consistent patterns have emerged and spurred new questions. We present a brief overview of what we have learned in terms of measuring and understanding management practices and condense the implications of these findings for policy. We end with an outline of what we see as the path forward for both research and policy implications of this research programme.

The World Management Survey at 18: Lessons and the Way Forward

Abstract Understanding how differences in management ‘best practices’ affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics, and public policy. The World Management Survey (WMS) project was born almost two decades ago with the main goal of developing a new systematic measure of management practices being used in organizations. The WMS has contributed to a body of knowledge around how managerial structures, not just managerial talent, relate to organizational performance. Over 18 years of research, a set of consistent patterns have emerged and spurred new questions. We present a brief overview of what we have learned in terms of measuring and understanding management practices and condense the implications of these findings for policy. We end with an outline of what we see as the path forward for both research and policy implications of this research programme.

World Management Survey at 18: Lessons and the Way Forward

World Management Survey at 18: Lessons and the Way Forward

Measuring the effect of management on production: a two-tier stochastic frontier approach

We revisit the production frontier of a firm, and we examine the effects that the firm’s management has on output. In order to estimate these effects using a cross-sectional sample while avoiding the costly requirement of obtaining data on management as a production factor, we develop a two-tier stochastic frontier model where management is treated as a latent variable. The model is consistent with the microeconomic theory of the firm, and it can estimate the effect of management on the output of a firm in monetary terms from different angles, separately from inefficiency. The approach can thus contribute to the cost–benefit analysis related to the management system of a company, and it can facilitate research related to management pay and be used in studies of the determinants of management performance. We also present an empirical application, where we find that the estimates from our latent-variable model align with the results obtained when we use the World Management Survey scores that provide a measure of management.