ساماندهی دانش برای رقابت با تاثیرات برنامه های توسعه ظرفیت در سازمان شرکت Organizing knowledge to compete Impacts of capacity building programs on firm organization

1. Introduction Enhancing productivity is the key to achieve sustainable growth. Although our knowledge on the determinants of productivity is still limited (Syverson, 2011), there are strong reasons, supported by empirical evidence, suggesting that firms’ organization matters. Production requires the organization of several inputs (e.g. land, machines, raw material, labor, information, among others), including the knowledge of workers. From a firm’s perspective, optimizing its productivity means organizing these inputs efficiently. The lack of capacity for reaching this efficiency may explain important differences in productivity across firms and countries (see Bloom and Van Reenen, 2007, 2010; Bloom et al., 2010). Since the pioneering work of Roberts and Tybout (1997), Clerides et al. (1998) and Melitz (2003), trade literature has emphasized that firms’ productivity is heterogeneous not only across sectors, but also within them.1 Caliendo and Rossi-Hansberg (2012) suggest differences in the way firms organize knowledge as one source of heterogeneity. Their model is built in the spirit of Garicano (2000) in which production requires organization of knowledge and inputs. The model suggests that the way firms organize knowledge plays a key role in their capacity to compete with other firms, domestically and abroad. The moment firms introduce new products, their market size determines which organization is compatible with their scale of production. Larger demand will enable firms to reorganize their production by adding new layers of managers and economizing knowledge from production workers.3 By assuming that employees can act as production workers or managers, this framework can also be connected to the literature that finds a positive association between management’s quality and firms’ performance (see Bloom and Van Reenen, 2007; Mion and Opromolla, 2014; Bloom et al., 2013). 4 These findings have important implications by suggesting that firms’ performance may be enhanced by policies that create incentives to improve management practices and change the way firms organize their knowledge for production. Although there is an increasing empirical literature showing the importance of management and organization on firms’ performance, there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of programs aiming to improve firms’ organization. This paper aims to contribute to this literature by analyzing the effect of Peiex (Portuguese acronym for Industrial Extension Project for Exporting) on firms’ organization, based on hierarchy of knowledge. Peiex is a program from the Brazilian Export Promotion Agency (Apex-Brasil) that focuses on enhancing Brazilian small and medium firms’ (SMEs’) competitiveness by providing coaching and consulting on best management and production practices.5 This paper is closely related to Bloom et al. (2013), who find significant effects of a management consulting program on firms’ performance in India.6 This paper also complements the findings of Caliendo et al. (2015a), which suggest that failure to reorganize while expanding could lead to a missing opportunity of productivity improvements, and Caliendo et al. (2017), who analyze the effects of exporting on the organization of production within firms.