‘Organizational Linkages: Understanding tho Productivity Paradox (1984)
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into three groups. The first group contains structural characteristics.
‘These factors are fairly permanent organizational characteristics that
by their very nature would produce the paradox. The second group
involves side effects from organizational interventions that could re-
duce or eliminate the positive effects of an intervention. The third group
comprises measurement issues. The first two groups of factors have
been discussed in earlier chapters and thus are only touched on briefly
here for the sake of completeness.
Structural Factors
Structural factors are characteristics of the organization itself thet
could produce the paradox. Time lag is one such factor. Because of the
structure of tasks in an organization, improvements in one subsystem
sometimes take considerable time to show up in the combined outputs
of the broader system. Other structural factors are slack, bottlenecks
in the availability of needed inputs, the centrality of the task to the
overall functioning of the organization, and the degree of interdepen-
dence of people and subsystems in producing the output. (See Chap-
ters 2 for discussions of structural factors.)
Structural factors have two important things in common. First,
they are natural and unavoidable aspects of organizational function-
ing. Second, they all reduce the one-to-one correspondence between
the outputs of one subsystem and the outputs of a broader subsystem.
‘That is, they will in and of themselves produce data that, look like the
productivity paradox. Thus, to the extent that the paradox is caused
by structural factors, there is 0 real paradox. This leads to the follow-
ing hypothesis:
+ The greater the presence of structural factors that naturally
reduce the one-to-one correspondence between the outputs of sub-
systems that combine their outputs, the greater the likelihood of
the appearance of a productivity paradox
Intervention Side Effects
The second group of effects that could produce the paradox consists
of unintended consequences of the intervention. It could be that direct
measures of the effects of an intervention indicate improvement, but
other effects of the intervention have a negative consequence at a broader
level of analysis.
‘There are several types of such side effects. One type occurs when
the intervention changes the focus of the effort from one unit of analy-