ORGANIZATIONAL CONFIGURATION AND PERFORMANCE: THE CASE OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOL SYSTEMS By William G. Ouchi, Bruce S. Cooper, Lydia G. Segal, Tim DeRoche, Carolyn Brown, and Elizabeth Galvin The Anderson School of Management UCLA 110 Westwood Plaza, Suite B523 Los Angeles, Ca. 90095-1481
[email protected] May 30, 2003 – Working Paper Draft This research was funded through grants from the National Science Foundation (Grant # 0115559), Dr. Peter Bing, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Frank and Kathy Baxter Family Foundation, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The authors wish to acknowledge the work done on this project by John Gabree, Bernice Tsai, James Mirocha, and Stephanie Kagimoto. We also received helpful suggestions on early drafts from Fred Ali, Christine Beckman, Tom Boysen, Gloria Chalmers, Beverly Donohue, Harry Handler, Tom Hofstedt, Sanford Jacoby, Dan Katzir, Barbara Lawrence, Paul Lawrence, David Lewin, Allan Odden, Janice Riddell, Randy Ross, Morton Schapiro, Dorothy Siegel, Olav Sorenson, Deborah Stipek, Kaye Stripling, Joseph Viteritti, and Oliver Williamson, for which we are grateful. ABSTRACT Williamson has argued that in large organizations, decentralization of a particular type, known as the M-Form, outperforms more centralized types. We ask whether the effect applies to large school systems, as is does to businesses. Our research team investigated nine school systems, including the three largest districts in the United States; three (in Canada and the U.S.) that use an innovative budgeting system to achieve a radically decentralized M-Form structure; and the three largest Catholic Archdiocesan systems in the U.S. Our data generally support the view that decentralized public school districts outperform more centralized districts on student performance outcomes, administrative efficiency, and incidence of corruption.