چه چیزی باعث عملکرد بهره وری منابع مالی و یا کساد منابع می شود؟ : شواهدی از شرکت های تولیدی ایالات متحده از سال 1991 تا 2006

Extant research in operations management has revealed divergent insights into the value potential of resource efficiency. While one view relates efficiency with good operations management and asserts that slack resources are a form of waste that should be minimized, the other view suggests that limited resource slack can impose heavy costs on firms by making them brittle. In this research, the authors build on these views to investigate the relationship of inventory, production, and marketing resource efficiency of firms with three metrics of financial performance (i.e., Stock-Returns, Tobin's Q, and Returns-on-Assets). The authors evaluate the theoretical framework using secondary information on all U.S. based publicly-owned manufacturing firms across the 16-year time period of 1991–2006. Analysis utilizing a mixed-model approach reveals that a focus on resource efficiency is positively associated with firm financial performance. However, findings also support the arguments favoring slack, indicating that the financial gains from resource efficiency exhibit diminishing returns.

The relationship between resource efficiency and firm performance has been debated by operations management researchers for decades (Adler et al., 2009). One view has equated efficiency with “good” operations management (Hall, 1983 and Zipkin, 1991), and has asserted that excess resources are a form of waste that should be minimized (Womack et al., 1990). Researchers taking this view further argue that a focus on resource efficiency allows firms to make their operations more stable and predictable and affords them lower overall costs (Deming, 1986 and Taylor, 1911). In line with this perspective, some studies have reported a positive effect of inventory (e.g., Chen et al., 2005 and Gaur et al., 2005), production (e.g., Browning and Heath, 2009 and Shah and Ward, 2003), and marketing (e.g., Dutta et al., 1999 and Krasnikov and Jayachandran, 2008) resource efficiency on firm performance. In contrast, other researchers have questioned the value potential of efficiency, instead suggesting that efficiency can impose heavy costs on firms by making them “brittle” (Abernathy, 1978 and Cyert and March, 1963). This view argues that resource slack allows firms to experiment with new ideas (Nelson and Winter, 1982 and Nohria and Gulati, 1996), and better cater to multiple competitive priorities simultaneously without sacrificing performance (e.g., Rosenzweig and Easton, 2010, Schmenner and Swink, 1998 and Skinner, 1969). Further, operational slack has been posited to lower the risks of supply chain disruptions for firms (Chopra and Sodhi, 2004, Ferrer et al., 2007 and Stauffer, 2003), crucial for effective supply chain management (Narasimhan and Talluri, 2009). Along these lines, evidence indicates that resource slack attenuates financial markets’ negative reactions to announcements of supply chain disruptions by firms (Hendricks et al., 2009). These two divergent views – one emphasizing resource efficiency and the other underscoring the value of resource slack – are also mirrored in the business press, with columnists blaming inefficient resource management for lower financial performance of Sony Corp. in one case (Simms, 2009), while chastising Verizon Corp. for maintaining low levels of slack in key resources in another (Flitter, 2008). Together, this debate has led to inconsistent guidelines for operations managers, with limited insight on how efficiency (vs. slack) relate to financial performance for firms. As such, there is a need to formulate an integrated framework that helps answer the following question – What are the financial benefits to firms from following either of the two resource strategies, i.e., developing resource efficiency or maintaining resource slack? In this research we attempt to answer this question by investigating the relationships of inventory, production, and marketing resource efficiency of firms with three metrics of financial performance. Specifically, we build on prior research that defines slack as excess inputs for the same level of output, i.e., lower efficiency (Bourgeois, 1981 and Hendricks et al., 2009), to evaluate if increasing levels of resource efficiency lead to diminishing financial returns for firms. To empirically validate our framework, we focus on all publicly-owned firms operating in manufacturing industries in the United States for whom key information from secondary data sources was available over a 16-year time-period (i.e., 1991–2006). Results reveal that a focus on resource efficiency is positively related with Stock-Returns, Tobin's Q, and Returns-on-Assets (ROA) of firms over time. However, analysis also supports arguments favoring slack, indicating that the financial gains from efficiency exhibit diminishing returns for inventory and production resources. Diminishing returns are also observed for marketing resource efficiency, but only in relation to Stock-Returns and ROA. Overall, the results thus reveal that a focus on resource efficiency, albeit with a moderate level of slack, affords higher financial value to firms–an important implication which would not be understood if a singular emphasis on either efficiency or slack is used. In examining our central question, we offer multiple contributions to both theory and practice in operations management. First, one of the primary reasons for the mixed evidence for the link between efficiency and performance has been that researchers have singularly focused either on examining the effect of resource efficiency on financial performance (Chen et al., 2005), or on investigating the effect of operational slack in attenuating negative effects of supply chain disruptions (e.g., Hendricks et al., 2009). As such, our attempt to integrate these insights in making our predictions and empirically validating them with a large sample of firms over a relatively long period of time helps offer a holistic perspective on the resource efficiency–financial performance relationship. Second, our key finding that resource efficiency, albeit with a moderate level of slack, results in better financial performance for firms are consistent with the prescriptions offered by operations management researchers discussing the “productivity dilemma” facing firms (Abernathy, 1978 and Adler et al., 2009). Specifically, our results are in line with Skinner's (1969) and Wheelwright's (1978) argument that a focus on cost efficiency is typically not sufficient for competitive advantage, and thus should further motivate operations managers to look beyond efficiency gains in making their strategic decisions. Third, although several studies have investigated the relationship of inventory, production, and marketing resources with financial performance, research has not considered all three within a single framework. For instance, some studies have focused on inventory (e.g., Chen et al., 2005 and Gaur et al., 2005), while others have centered on production resources (e.g., Vickery et al., 1993) as determinants of firm performance. In contrast, research in marketing has instead focused on marketing resources (cf., Srinivasan and Hanssens, 2009). By considering these three resources in a common framework, we provide a more generalizable set of findings with our research. Finally, we recognize that financial performance of firms is multidimensional in nature. For instance, taking the perspective of investors finance theorists typically focus on stock market-based measures of financial performance (e.g., Fama and French, 1993), whereas accounting researchers prefer accounting-based measures (e.g., Fairfield et al., 1996). In line with these differing emphases, much of the extant research in operations management has concentrated on one or the other set of financial performance indicators in its investigations. In contrast, we consider both stock market-based and accounting-based metrics in our analysis. First, we use stock-response modeling (e.g., Brennan, 1991, Carhart, 1997 and Lev, 1989) to not only provide evidence related to stock returns as a measure of financial value, but also introduce a new methodology from the finance literature in operations management research. Second, we focus on Tobin's Q, the ratio of market value of a firm to the replacement cost of its assets, as a forward-looking measure that summarizes a firm's intangible value (Lindenberg and Ross, 1981). Finally, we include Return-on-Assets (ROA) as a measure of financial performance, since it provides information about the profitability of a firm to investors (e.g., Ou and Penman, 1989). Evidence that firms benefit through higher Stock-Returns, Tobin's Q, and ROA allows us to more comprehensively understand the financial value of resource efficiency (vs. slack). In the following section, we begin by developing our conceptual framework. In Section 3, we present our research methodology. In Section 4, we discuss our analysis and results. We close with research and managerial implications of our findings, limitations of our research, and directions for future research in Section 5.

In this research, we investigated the relationship of inventory, production, and marketing resource efficiency with stock-returns, Tobin's Q, and Returns-of-Assets (ROA) as three metrics of firm financial performance. Prior research provides divergent views regarding the financial benefits of resource efficiency vs. slack for firms (Adler et al., 2009). We built on these insights to propose that although resource efficiency is important for firms to increase their financial value, there are also benefits of maintaining some slack in key resources. We evaluated our predictions through analysis of secondary information collected for 3,608 publicly-owned manufacturing firms operating in the United States across the years 1991–2006. Overall, our framework, analysis, and results provide some important research and managerial implications. First, our results confirm our predictions that inventory, production, and marketing resource efficiency improvements positively influence firms’ stock-returns, Tobin's Q, and ROA, but with diminishing returns. These findings thus provide empirical support to the suggestion put forth by extant research that as firms start to approach their industry asset frontiers they experience tradeoffs (Rosenzweig and Easton, 2010 and Schmenner and Swink, 1998), which may reflect in diminished performance. Further, these results are also in line with the proposal that a singular focus on cost efficiency is often not sufficient for competitive advantage (e.g., Skinner, 1969 and Wheelwright, 1978). As such, our research should motivate operations managers to follow the rich prescriptions offered in the extant operations management literature on designing the appropriate operations strategy for their firms (e.g., Hayes and Wheelwright, 1985, Schmenner and Swink, 1998, Skinner, 1969 and Skinner, 1996). Second, by considering inventory, production, and marketing resources within a single framework, our research delivers more comprehensive insights than offered in extant literature. Researchers in operations management focus more on operations related resources such as inventory or production resources. Similarly, scholars in marketing tend to emphasize the relevance of marketing resources in their investigations. Our results confirm that all resources, i.e., inventory, production, and marketing resources are critical for firm performance, and underscore the importance to managers of having a holistic view of their resource configurations to maximize their firms’ financial returns. Further, our results offer managers unique insight into the differential influence of these resources on various performance measures. With respect to stock-returns, our overall results (Table 4a) indicate that improvements in inventory resource efficiency have the highest potential to improve stock performance, followed by production resource efficiency and marketing resource efficiency. Similarly, results for Tobin's Q (Table 4b) indicate that intangible value may be improved most by efficiency improvements in inventory resource efficiency, followed by production resource efficiency. Also, our findings indicate that a focus on marketing resource efficiency may prove detrimental to the intangible value of the firm. Finally, from a profitability standpoint, results for ROA (Table 4c) indicate that marketing resource efficiency has the highest impact on profitability, followed by inventory and production resource efficiency. Third, our empirical framework can provide guidelines for managers to formulate a benchmarking tool that they may use to develop estimates of financial gains from improving inventory, production, and marketing resource efficiency in their firms relative to their industry. An example of such a tool based on our results across all industries and its application for managerial decision making are presented in Tables D1a–D1c in Appendix D.5 For example, a manager from a firm that is at the 84.13 percentile of its industry with respect to inventory efficiency (i.e., one standard deviation above the industry mean), can assess whether to make efforts to reach the 93.32 percentile (i.e., 1.5 standard deviation above the industry mean). Table D1a would suggest that by making such an efficiency gain, the manager can expect an average improvement of 2.08% (prediction range of 2.02–2.14%) in her firm's stock-returns, an average gain of 4.70% (prediction range of 4.68–4.72%) in its Tobin's Q, and an average decline of −0.16% (prediction range of −0.25% to −0.06%) in its ROA. Our model estimates may also guide managers in identifying inflection points in financial performance resulting from efficiency improvements of the three resources. For instance, Table D1a shows that stock-returns improvements from focusing on inventory resource efficiency reach an inflection point when firms reach approximately 99.87 percentile of their industry. Improvements in inventory resource efficiency, while leading to diminishing returns, do not result in a negative impact on Tobin's Q. Finally, the inflection point for ROA, with respect to inventory resource efficiency, is at approximately 89.44 percentile. As such, a firm which improves its inventory resource efficiency to move from 89.44 percentile to 93.32 percentile may experience on average 0.18% reduction in ROA. Similarly, for production resource efficiency the inflection point is at 99.70 percentile in case of Tobin's Q and at 95.99 percentile for ROA. Finally, for marketing resource efficiency we find the inflection point at 99.38 percentile for Stock-Returns and approximately 84.44 percentile for ROA. In general, it is expected that firms will start to experience the diminishing impact from resource efficiency improvements first in their ROA, followed by Stock-Returns and Tobin's Q. Further, since the inflection points for Stock-Returns and Tobin's Q are observed at very high percentiles, our results indicate that although firms may experience diminishing returns from efficiency improvements on these two metrics they would likely not see an overall performance decline even at very high levels of resource efficiency. Fourth, we consider multiple dimensions of firm financial value in our analysis. This helps us to provide robust support for the financial performance implications of inventory, production, and marketing resource efficiency for firms. Our results indicate that by augmenting financial benchmark models – which predominantly focus on cash flow levels and earnings of firms (Srinivasan and Hanssens, 2009) – with inventory, production, and marketing resource efficiency measures, we can explain more variation in the stock market-based and accounting-based performance of firms. Finally, from a methodological perspective we introduce a new technique, i.e., stock-response modeling, to operations management research. To the best of our knowledge, this technique has not been used in extant operations management research and, therefore, presents a useful addition to the growing body of research linking operations management with financial performance of firms (e.g., Jacobs et al., 2010). Although our study provides important implications, it also suffers from some limitations which suggest useful avenues for future research. First, our measures of inventory, production, and marketing resource efficiency are at an aggregate level and do not provide visibility into specific efficiency initiatives that firms may adopt. This is because the financial and accounting databases used in our analysis do not provide such information for firms. As such, our study is suggestive about the three types of resources represented by these measures and may not provide tactical level insights. Future research may extend our analysis to capture the value relevance of different efficiency enhancing alternatives to provide additional guidelines to firms. Second, our research looks only at the financial performance implications of resource efficiency. Although firms are guided by financial considerations, they also strive to attain other performance objectives such as innovations (e.g., Nohria and Gulati, 1996) and lower environmental footprint (e.g., King and Lenox, 2002). As a next step, researchers may investigate the relationship of resource efficiency (vs. slack) with various innovation and environmental objectives of firms. Further, a growing body of research in strategic management suggests that firms often differ regarding the bargaining power enjoyed by their agents such as managers and worker unions vis-à-vis their shareholders (e.g., Coff, 1999 and Crook et al., 2008). As such, shareholders across firms may differ in the amount of organizational rent they can appropriate for themselves. Although our use of mixed models takes into account unobserved firm-level heterogeneity in the data, and thereby controls for some of these differences, future operations management researchers focused on financial performance may look into ways to directly account for these firm specific differences related to value appropriation.6 Third, research suggests that in addition to efficiency, flexibility in a firm's operations management is also critical for performance. Therefore, future research may also develop measures of supply chain flexibility to augment our framework. Finally, our focus on measuring resource efficiencies based on inventory, PPE, and SGA in the paper was guided by the objective of capturing information on a large sample of firms from multiple periods over a relatively long period of time. However, these metrics may not comprehensively capture all aspects of inventory, production, and marketing resources respectively. Future research should explore other ways to capture these three firm resources to evaluate the robustness of our findings.