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, relates to organizational performance. Over
18 years of research, a set of consistent patterns have emerged and spurred new questions. We
will 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.
Social scientists have studied the importance of managers and of management practices for over
a century, and today armed with large and representative datasets are confident that management is
crucial for organizational performance. Understanding how differences in the adoption of 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. Earlier efforts relied
primarily on case studies, but over the past two decades we have seen an explosion of new datasets
and computing power that allow for careful measurement of these practices across a range of
organizational types.
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 organisations.
Since 2002, we have been building the largest cross-country dataset including manufacturing and
retail firms, schools and hospitals, and we have provided assistance to other teams looking to use
the methodology in numerous other industries. To date, our dataset includes over 13,000 firms and
4,000 schools and hospitals, spanning over 35 countries.1 Other teams using the WMS methodology
have collected data on government bureaucracies [Rasul and Rogger, 2018, Rasul et al., 2018],
universities [McCormack et al., 2014], primary healthcare facilities and many more. The methods
and availability of WMS data is open to all, and at time of writing over 5,000 researchers have
downloaded the public dataset for research projects and benchmarking exercises.
The WMS has contributed to a body of knowledge around how managerial structures, not
just managerial talent, relates to organizational performance. A series of stylized facts have taken
form over the past eighteen years of research, both elucidating the robust positive performance management relationship, understanding how to improve measurement (such as the more recent
Management and Organizational Practices Surveys) and raising a number of important questions
about mechanisms driving the diversity of management practices. 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 in the form of a simple table: a “management policy
toolkit”. We end with an outline of what we see as the path forward for both research and policy
implications of this research program.
Source:https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-world-management-survey-at-18-lessons-and-the-way-forward