Weaving Straw into Gold: Managing Organizational Tensions Between Standardization and Flexibility in Microfinance
通过田野调查和贷款数据，研究小额信贷机构如何平衡标准化效率与灵活响应客户需求，发现贷款官执行规则的风格多样性在信贷委员会中产生建设性张力，从而提升组织绩效。
This article explores how organizations balance the pressures to pursue efficiency through standardization with the need to remain responsive to local needs. The study combines rich ethnography with detailed loan data to show that both standardization and flexibility through relational ties provide substantial organizational benefits but also carry significant costs; thus, no strategy is inherently superior, and their coexistence generates the best results. Such coexistence, however, creates contradictions that must be managed. Here, I use microfinance as a strategic setting and gain analytic leverage from the random assignment across branches of loan officers who exhibit significant heterogeneity in rule enforcement styles: some enforce rules strictly, whereas others frequently bend them to respond to client needs. I find that loan officers with relational styles exercise discretion productively to enhance organizational performance. Yet their effectiveness is contingent on the presence of rule-enforcing peers, as evidenced by the significant underperformance of branches with a high concentration of officers of either type. In contrast, branches that contain discretionary diversity, or a balance between enforcement styles, perform best. This is not due to diversity per se, but because loan officers process decisions in local credit committees. Committees that contain discretionary diversity generate a productive tension that induces participants to justify decisions along broader organizational goals, thus maintaining a productive balance between standardization and flexibility. Implications for organizational theory and practice are discussed.