Resumen de Productivity essays on coopetition, organizational downsizing and restructuring /
This dissertation aims to provide answers to traditional questions in the business literature using well-adopted economic tools. By bringing together accounting and productivity fields, it analyzes the contribution to the financial performance change from different drivers of productivity change. The methodological contributions throughout the dissertation provide novel instruments to the management on their decision making to enhance the competitiveness of the business.
Chapter One proposes a definition of the potential economic incentives for competitors to collaborate with each other: coopetition. With a non-parametric approach based on a financial performance measure (return on assets, ROA), it compares between non-coopetition and coopetition statuses. Potential ROA gains from coopetition are decomposed by economic driver. Using the European automobile industry, a sample of over forty-five thousand cases of two-plant potential cooperation is created, in the period from 2000 to 2012. Roughly twelve thousand of these cases presented ROA gains from coopetition, mainly driven by higher productivity gains of coopetition. As well, smaller plants find stronger economic incentives for coopetition, but this effect is only fruitful when they actively engage to coopetition. The chapter offers some policy recommendations on the legal framework of competition issued at the EU level.
Chapter Two proposes a novel methodology to define and measure organizational downsizing, which encompasses not only changes in labor but also all the inputs employed by an organizational unit. This definition is used to assess the downsizing effect on productivity changes, which can be directly linked to changes in ROA. Thereby, it directly measures the contribution from downsizing to the financial performance change. A natural extension of that definition is presented for labor downsizing, which relates to the commonly adopted definition in the literature, merely dependent on labor changes. The methodology is illustrated using European automobile production plants from 2000 to 2012. Organizational downsizing among automobile plants was found to have no effect on ROA, whereas related effects worsened the financial performance all over the period.
Chapter Three expands upon the previous one, defining organizational restructuring: upsizing or downsizing. The chapter is a deeper analysis of the performance outcomes of different restructuring processes in the Automobile industry in Europe. It compares two opposite samples of organizational downsizers and organizational upsizers to understand better their differences. Several hypotheses were introduced, which directly compare the restructuring-related contributions to financial performance in the two groups. Results for the two subsamples in that industry were significantly different: organizational downsizing contributed to worsen financial performance whereas organizational upsizing contributed to improve it. On average, upsizers obtained higher contribution to financial performance from restructuring, technical change and efficiency change (three drivers of productivity change). For downsizers, input prices reductions did not compensate the detrimental productivity losses.
