冗余资源与企业绩效关系的情境研究——兼谈冗余资源的数量变化

A Contextual Analysis on the Relationship between Slack and Firms’ Performance:Also on Quantitative Change of Slack

文献普遍认为冗余资源在企业经营状况良好时增加,经营状况不良时减少,事实真的如此吗学者们在争论应该用何种理论解释冗余资源作用的同时,忽略了该资源本身也是企业行为的结果和管理的对象,以及企业情境会影响它与绩效之间的关系。本文认为冗余资源数量偏离预期时,企业会据此进行响应,而这种响应所造成的结果在经营状况不同的企业中会有所区别。本文选取我国上市公司作为样本进行分析,发现经营状况不良的企业,非沉淀性冗余资源显著减少,而沉淀性冗余资源却显著增加,冗余资源和企业绩效之间均存在正U型关系;经营状况良好的企业中,其非沉淀性冗余资源显著增加,而且冗余资源和企业绩效之间存在倒U型关系。

Slack usually means abundant,idle and inefficient,while organizations still remain a certain amount of slack.One of the most important reasons is that slack have the function of buffering when changes happen in-or outside of the organization.Many scholars argue that,organizations strive to amass slack resources during tranquil periods,and consume them during jolts.The roles of slack are in debates,and the debates focus on which theories should be used to explain the role.But most of the scholars ignore the facts that slack itself is the outcome and objects of management activities,and the relationship between slack and performance depends on the firm’s situation.This article argues that the amounts of slack deviating from expectations may result in changes of firm’s behaviors.Firm’s capabilities and past performances will influence the relationship between slack and future performance.We select listed companies in China,and take the pre-special treated firms as the poor performance firms while taking blue chips as the excellent ones.Then,we find increase of unabsorbed slack and decrease of absorbed slack in firms which have poor performance,and the relationship of slack and performance is U-shaped in these firms.We also find unabsorbed slack is increasing and relationship between slack and performance is inverse U-shaped in the excellent firms.The conclusions of this paper confirm the fluctuations of slack quantities,and the trends of quantities changes differ between the poor performance firms and the excellent ones.These results proof the arguments of some scholars,namely the firms try to accumulate slack,except the absorbed slack in excellent firms.From the perspective of agency theory or organizational behavior theory,schol-ars get adverse points of the role of slack,but this paper proposes and intensifies that the role differ with firms’ situation and the characters of slack.This conclusion demonstrates that contextual study is indispensable for slack research.