The Impact of Management Practices and Organizational Structure on Firm Performance

Diploma Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Industrial Management, grade: 1,3, LMU Munich (Information, Organisation und Management / und CDTM), language: English, abstract: "The most significant factor in America, leading to high production at low cost, is efficient management." This quotation is not from a longitudinal, empirical study, but it is stated by the British Productivity Council in the context of the Marshal Plan - the Anglo - American productivity mission in 1951. Hence, one question might be: Is there indeed a strong link between management practices and firm performance? A further question might be: How American management practices rank compared with European or Asian management practices? And what role plays organizational structure on firm performance? Are there interacted effects between management practices and organizational structure? Insights into the impact of management practices and organizational structure on firm performance are mainly based on theories.Consequently, there is a strong need to measure management practices and organizational structure across countries and cultures to verify theoretical hypotheses with empirical data. This paper sheds some empirical light on these topics as well as on the distribution of management practices and organizational structures across countries and industries.This book is based on a unique data set with more than 3500 management interviews to document and analyze the influen...