| Historically, businesses in southeast Wisconsin enjoyed decades of prosperity when the region was a manufacturing center from approximately the 1880s to the early 2000s. Since the late 1980s the area's economy has been plagued with high unemployment due to the loss of many manufacturing companies. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether a firm's management practices, defined by Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) as operations, monitoring, targets and incentives, were related to its economic performance defined as increases/decreases in the number of employees. To accomplish this goal, a critical review of the relevant peer-reviewed and scholarly literature was conducted. A survey composed of 15 general firm identifier questions and 18 management practices was sent to the chief executive officers of all 682 qualified for-profit manufacturing and service firms in the metropolitan areas of southeast Wisconsin. The survey instrument was based on Bloom and Van Reenan's validated instrument which assessed the effect that management practices had on firms' economic performance. Upon analysis of the survey data, it was determined that each of the four null hypotheses in this study, which sought to determine if relationships existed between management practices and the economic performance of various types of firms located in the metropolitan areas of southeast, Wisconsin, could not be rejected. However, an examination of the survey data based upon firm ownership type demonstrated that management practices had a significant effect on the economic performance of firms in southeast Wisconsin at the .007 level of significance. |
