Leveraging and transferring management practices in organizations

Strategy focuses on explaining heterogeneous performance across agents, firms, and organizational arrangements. In the last couple of decades, a growing body of empirical research has started to study how heterogeneous adoption to management practices could be a main driver of performance differentials across and within organizations.. In this dissertation, I intend to jointly advance these literatures while refining strategic management theory. In my first study, I theoretically argue and empirically verify that traditional resource-based and practice-based explanations of superior performance are intrinsically intertwined. I use data from over 9,000 public and private high schools in Brazil to show that if resources and practices both have a direct effect on performance, resource endowments also affect the adoption of superior management practices. In my second study, I explore how organizations could benefit from strategically leveraging the performance enhancing potential of management practices by investing in partners’ management capital. In a setting of a partnership with Base-of-the-Pyramid entrepreneurs, I use highly detailed data from a single firm to show that investing in partners’ management capital may both boost performance and increase partnership strength. I argue that such dual role for management capital transfer is due to a relational cue given by the firm to a resource-constrained partner. Finally, in my last study I continue studying strategies to leverage management practices by turning my focus to the relative performance of alternative methods to disseminate practices across organizational units. Using two field experiment with real managers from a real firm, I show how the credibility of the individual transferring a practice may be a double-edged sword: while it may enhance practice adoption, it may encourage the adoption of only a subset of practices associated with the source’s expertise. I also show that tacit transfer methods, i.e. methods allowing for interaction between individuals and personalization, outperform explicit transfer methods, i.e. methods without interaction and personalization, in terms of the transfer of previously unscripted knowledge content of a practices. In sum, in this dissertation I cover not only the effects of management practices on performance and actionable strategies to leverage their potential to create value, but I also do it so while proposing refinements and advances to strategic management theory.