بوروکراسی در مقابل عملکرد بالا : سازماندهی مجدد کار در 1990s

During the time of increased work reorganization, I investigate the components of bureaucratic and high performance work systems and the sources of variation in an organization's adoption of bureaucratic and high performance practices. Findings from the 1996 National Organizations Survey suggest that the degree of workplace formalization, level of hierarchy, and number of departmentalization strongly indicate bureaucratic organizations, but the alleged high performance indicators of teamwork, skill enhancement, job autonomy, and innovative pay structures do not cohere to identify high performance work systems. Instead, teamwork and skill enhancement cluster to indicate one type of high performance work system, whereas job autonomy and performance-based pay constellate to identify another type. Multivariate analyses reveal that institutional mimetic isomorphism is the major factor that compels organizations to implement a certain work system. Organizations mimic their peers in their strategic adoption of different work systems. In addition, foreign market competition increases organizational adoption of teamwork and training programs to enhance skills.

Across continents corporate reconstruction has been at the top of employers’ agendas. Many business firms have accomplished unprecedented success through structural reorganization. For example, Wal-Mart has moved from the humble beginnings of a local five and dime to become a global powerhouse holding a lion's share of the retail market in only a short couple of decades. Chief factors that produce such a success are the adoption of many high performance practices including teamwork, decentralization of decision making, and lean process to maintain low overheads (Obloj et al., 1995: 171). Other successful cases in work reorganization involve implementation of various forms of teamwork, such as cross-functional teams in IBM and Honda City, and problem-solving teams in American hospital systems (Obloj et al., 1995: 77). However, despite decades-long studies on work structure transformation, researchers lack consensus on what constitutes transformed organizations, which are often labeled as high performance work systems (Osterman, 1994, Kalleberg and Moody, 1996, Cappelli and Neumark, 2001, Lawler et al., 1995, Godard and Delaney, 2000, Huselid, 1995 and Cappelli et al., 1997: Chpt. 3; Appelbaum and Batt, 1994 and Doeringer, 1991: Chpt. 9). A study on American workplace human resource practices with the 1991 National Organizations Survey measured high performance work systems with four indicators: decentralization, job training, performance-based compensation, and firm internal labor market (Kalleberg and Moody, 1996); another study used two waves of surveys of American manufacturing establishments to measure high performance work systems with five categories: self-directed work teams, job rotation, quality control, total quality management, and statistic process control (Osterman, 1994 and Osterman, 2000). The issue is complicated by subjectivity. Recently, a review of the new paradigm of human resource management practices identified several shortcomings in even identifying such systems: one of the most important is that high performance work systems are measured based on researchers’ judgment or preference (Godard and Delaney, 2000). Although scholars discuss the issue that high performance work systems accomplish labor control and coordination in contrast to the methods in bureaucratic work systems (Cappelli et al., 1997: Chpt. 3), few researchers empirically investigate the changing workplace structures in relation to the traditional bureaucratic work systems. Studies suggest that high performance work systems contradict bureaucratic work management in human resources practices. Bureaucratic organizations adopt rigid work structures and task assignments to establish an assembly line model and facilitate mass production (Scott, 1998 and Appelbaum and Batt, 1994: Chpt. 1). But the new economy of high performance work systems is characterized by product customerization and constant innovation (Knoke, 2001 and Appelbaum and Batt, 1994: Chpt. 8), which provides fertile ground for production with flattened hierarchy, democratic work structures, and equal participation in the decision-making from all levels of workers (Osterman, 1994, Kalleberg and Moody, 1996 and Lawler et al., 1995). However, in academia, the two work systems are not treated as in distinction from each other. For example, in recent empirical research on work systems, a set of essential indicators for bureaucratic work systems, such as personnel selection, performance evaluation, job design, grievance procedures, and promotion criteria (Marsden et al., 1996), are also used to measure high performance work systems (Huselid, 1995). Despite the empirical evidence that bureaucratic and high performance practices may be simultaneously present in one work organization (Yang, 2003), a clarification to demarcate the difference between bureaucracy and high performance work systems and to define the respective components is crucial to advance a scholarly understanding in this vein of work (Godard and Delaney, 2000). The topic of work restructuring is highly significant for some theoretical reasons – from the perspective of economics, organizations undertaking structural transformation are investing in an important asset – their organizational capital (Tomer, 1987 and Tomer, 2001) to develop a more cooperative system of labor relations that elicits high worker effort and thus higher x-efficiency (internal efficiency) (Altman, 1996). This study investigates the defining characteristics of bureaucratic and high performance work systems and the factors that drive organizations to adopt these two distinctive work structures. Thus, it should enhance our understanding of the components of this important organizational capital and the antecedent factors leading to organizational investment in such capital. To this end, this study uses the exploratory factor analyses and multivariate regression to address the two issues with a national representative sample of U.S. work establishments: (1) the relationship between bureaucratic and high performance work systems and their respective components; (2) the explanatory factors for the levels of bureaucratization and high performance practices adopted in American work organizations.

To empirically exam components of the latent factors of bureaucratic and high performance work systems, I conducted exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with seven structural indicators (for more on EFA, see Stevens, 2002: Chpt. 11 and Hair et al., 1998: Chpt. 3). As EFA can help researchers to determine how many factors are present, a crucial aspect of using EFA is the choice of which criterion to use to determine the number of factors. Here, I use eigenvalue criterion that retains the factors whose eigenvalues are greater than 1, which indicates that the retained factors account for the variance of at least a single indicator. This eigenvalue criterion is the most widely used method and also the default choice of SPSS in retaining factors. It is fairly accurate when the number of indicators is less than 40 (Stevens, 2002: Chpt. 11). Fig. 1 shows that the exploratory factor analysis of seven indicators extracts totally three factors: bureaucracy and two types of high performance work systems. The factors loadings are varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization based on 644 cases, which indicate the explained variance in the indicators by their factor. The factor loadings of formalization (0.76), hierarchy (0.70), and departmentalization (0.79) on the latent factor of “bureaucracy” are fairly high, suggesting a strong indication of bureaucracy from the three indicators, thus lending empirical support to H1. This finding concurs with the widely-held belief about the essential characteristics that define bureaucratic work systems since at least Weber (1947). Organizations respond to their increasing size with management using lateral specialization, vertical hierarchical orders, and formalized rules and regulations.In contrast to H2, the four hypothetical indicators of high performance work systems; e.g. teamwork, skill enhancement, performance-based compensation, and job autonomy do not cohere to define the latent structure of high performance system. Instead, they split into two groups. Teamwork and training, which has factor loading of 0.92 and 0.68, respectively, cling to indicate one type of high performance work system, whereas job autonomy and performance-based compensation, with respective factor loading of 0.72 and 0.66, adhere to represent a different type of high performance system. That training goes hand-in-hand with the teamwork implementation echoes previous studies that emphasize training as facilitator to the success of other innovative high performance work practices (Whitfield, 2000). Teamwork requires re-orientation of work roles, goals, and job responsibilities and tremendous communication and coordination skills that have to be furnished through sufficient training (Coleman, 1993). High performance work systems have been striving to establish an incentive mechanism by tying individual workers’ interests with the organization's interests through performance-based pay structures (Kalleberg and Moody, 1996). A positive consequence of this new incentive structure is that workers, without rigid monitoring, can achieve a high level of self-motivation (Levine and D’Andrea Tyson, 1990). The new incentive structures also intend to save organizations of resources spent on worker supervision. Thus, while performance-based pay structures reflect organization's new motivation strategy, offering workers great job autonomy is natural consequence of such strategy. The correlations between the three work systems show that bureaucracy is weakly and negatively correlate with both high performance systems (−0.22 and −0.14), whereas the two high performance systems are weakly correlated with each other (0.20). This result indicates the direction of the relations between the three work systems; the greater bureaucratization of the organization, the fewer the high performance programs adopted by the organization; Organizations adopting teamwork and training are also likely to adopt job autonomy and performance-based pay programs. However, the correlations are too low to suggest any substantive changes in organization's adoption of one type of work system in relation to the other systems. In sum, the EFA of seven organization structural indicators show that bureaucratization is indicated by a set of distinctively defined indicators such as formalization, vertical hierarchical layers, and lateral departmentalization, lending support to previous study that bureaucratic work systems use formal policies and fine-graded classification at lateral and vertical dimensions to manage its workforce (Edwards, 1979). However, the alleged four high performance indicators of teamwork, skills enhancement, job autonomy, and performance pay programs diverge: teamwork and training associate to indicate one type of innovative work structure, whereas job autonomy and performance pay programs converge to represent another type of transformed work system. This result echoes previous empirical findings (Osterman, 1994) and theoretical discussions that American employers are implementing high performance practices on a gradual and piecemeal basis, instead of deploying a lump-sum batch of innovative programs simultaneously (Appelbaum and Batt, 1994). Table 1 lists descriptive statistics of the variables in the regression equation. The results show that American work establishments are fairly formalized, indicated by an average score of 3.25 in the formalization measure. The mean scores for the other two bureaucratic indicators, hierarchy and departmentalization are 2.45 and 1.83, respectively. In the four high performance measures, the average establishments in the NOS sample have approximately three teamwork committees to deal with corporate issues regarding technology, product quality, delivery, health and safety. They also have more than 1 skill enhancement program, provide workers with “more than a moderate amount” of job autonomy, and use no innovative pay programs.Organizations reported to have “more than a moderate amount of competition” in their operating market, as indicated in the average score of 3.28 in the market competition measure. The level of international market competition is lower than the main market competition as the NOS work establishments are facing less than a moderate level (average of 1.77 in the measurement) in foreign market competition. The percentages of bureaucratic organizations across the nine industries range from the lowest of 36.2 in retail to the highest of 87.1 of public administration. Table 1 shows that while professional service organizations are the least likely to adopt teamwork and training, manufacturers are most likely to espouse these two programs. Wholesalers are most likely to implementing job autonomy and performance-based pay program, whereas retailers are least likely to do so. Table 1 also contains descriptive statistics of other variables under control. In light of the findings from the previous round of exploratory factor analysis, the following explanatory analyses focus on factors that compel organizations to adopt a work system based on the trichotomy consisting of bureaucracy and two types of high performance systems, rather than the presumed dichotomy of bureaucracy and high performance work system. As the SPSS saves the three extracted factors (the three work systems) as variables, I dichotomize organizations in the three systems using their respective means as the cut-off point. Therefore, logistic regressions are used to investigate the explanatory variables that induce organizations to adopt different types of work system, e.g. high bureaucracy, high teamwork and training, and high job autonomy and performance-based pay. The measures of the industrial isomorphism are the percentages of bureaucratic organizations, of organizations adopting teamwork and training, and of organizations adopting performance-based pay and job autonomy programs in the same industry as the focal organization. These measures are created by crosstabulating the nine industries with the percentages of the three systems and then imputing each organization with the industrial percentages of the organization. Table 2 displays unstandardized coefficients from logistic regression of the organizational adoption of bureaucratic work structures and high performance work systems of teamwork and training (HPO1), and of job autonomy and performance-based pay structures (HPO2). In support of H4, the higher the international market competition, the more likely the organizations adopt high performance work system; Table 2 shows that each unit of increase in foreign market competition increases the odds of adopting teamwork and training by 19% (exp(0.177) − 1 = 0.19). However, the results did not support H3, H5, and H6; domestic and foreign market competitions have no impact on organization adoption of bureaucracy; domestic market competition does not affect organization adoption of either type of high performance work structures. The fact that only one out of four hypotheses from market model receives empirical support suggests that market competition has only moderate impact on organization choice of different work systems.In contrast, institutional isomorphism, indicated by the percentage of organizations in the same industry as the focal organization that adopts bureaucracy or high performance work systems, exert strong impact on organizational choice of different work systems. In support of H7 and H8, Table 2 shows that across industries, each percentage increase in the number of bureaucratic organizations increases the odds of adopting bureaucracy for organizations by 1.7% (exp(0.017) − 1 = 0.017). In other words, the higher the percentages of bureaucratic organizations at the industry level, the more likely the organizations adopt bureaucracy within the industry. Likewise, across industries, each percentage of increase in the number of organizations adopting teamwork and training increases the organization adoption of these two programs by the odds of 3% (exp(0.03) − 1 = 0.03), but it decreases the odds that focal organization adopt bureaucracy by of 3.7% (exp(−0.038) − 1 = −0.037). Meanwhile, across industries, each percentage of increase of organizations adopting performance-based pay and job autonomy increases the odds of focal organization's adoption of these two high performance practices by 4.6% (exp(0.045) − 1 = 0.046). Several control variables exert significant impact on organization adoption of different work systems. Size increases the odds of adopting bureaucracy control but decreases the likelihoods of implementing job autonomy and performance-based pay. Compared with the organizations that have localized market areas such as neighborhood, city, and state, organizations with expanded markets such as regional, national, or international markets are more likely to adopt teamwork and training. Both performance pressures to retain essential workers and the organization independency boost organization's odds to adopt bureaucratic control work system. This round of regression analyses attempt to identify the factors that compel organizations to adopt innovative high performances or stick with the traditional bureaucracy. The results strongly indicate that organizations react more to the institutional pressures than they do to the market pressures. Such a structural conformity to the mode, expressed as the greater the number of organizations in an industry adopting certain work system, the more likely the organizations with in the same industry to adopt the same work system, reflects that organizations mimic their peers to reduce the uncertainties in implementing certain work system. Uncertainties are the core propels for the dissipations of the mimetic isomorphism. One study vividly described how organizations dealing with many uncertainties mimic the behaviors of other organizations in their environments (Galaskiewicz and Wasserman, 1989). To the extent that adopting different work structures is such pivotal strategic choice the companies have to make, modeling other successful establishments that have prior experience in implementing certain work systems becomes crucial in constructing those systems. The other organizations can provide much-needed information on how to initiate changes, deal with crisis, and solve problems to facilitate transitions for organizations implementing various work managements.