An analysis of workforce efficiency using organization expenses indicators

The objective of this paper is to carry out an evaluation of employee efficiency in the United States using a professional data base, namely the ECS Survey on Workforce Efficiency (2000/2001) conducted by Watson Wyatt, which includes the responses of 453 organizations covering 1,685,336 employees. To that end, we measure workforce efficiency of US organizations, differentiated by profit status, industry sector and employee size, using expenses indicators. Our findings reveal that new employee strengths will depend upon developing and using the kinds of information and analyzes that can keep workers, educators, employers and employee program administrators abreast or ahead of changing conditions.

Organizational configuration, fit and performance: The case of the pharmaceutical industry in Portugal

Miles e Snow’s configurational theory has received a great deal of attention from many investigators. Framing the Miles e Snow Typology with the organizational configuration concept, the main purpose of this paper is to make an empirical evaluation of what configurational theories postulate: higher organizational performance is associated to the resemblance to one of the ideal types defined. However, as it is often assumed that an organization can increase performance by selecting the adjustable hybrid type to its own exogenous environment, the relation between the organization’s effectiveness and the hybrid configuration alignment to the respective specific environment types was also analyzed. The assumption of equifinality was also considered because the configurational theory assumes that all the ideal types can potentially achieve the same performance level. A multiple regression model was made to confirm if the misfit related to the ideal and hybrid types has significant impact on the organizational effectiveness. The analysis of variance and the Kruskal-Wallis test were used to verify the equality of performance between the different organization types. In short, the empirical results obtained confirm what is postulated in the theory.