Complementarities and Coordination: Implications for Governance Mode and Performance of Multiproduct Firms
研究了多产品企业的产品组合策略与治理模式之间的匹配关系，发现产品组合越宽，企业越倾向于整合互补活动（如雇佣医生而非外包），偏离此匹配会损害财务绩效。
We explore the fit between a firm’s product portfolio strategy and its governance mode with respect to complementary activities that underlie its product offering. We view firm’s governance choice through the lens of orchestrating complementary activities that entail multiple interrelated and often simultaneously occurring transactions. Our key premise is that a broader product portfolio, while offering benefits through the bundle of complementary activities, raises the coordination costs for firms, making integration of complementary activities a preferred mode of governance. We find strong support for our arguments in the context of the U.S. healthcare industry. Hospitals with a narrow service portfolio are more likely to have contracts with physicians as external service providers, and hospitals with a broad service portfolio are more likely to employ their own physicians. Moreover, hospitals that deviate from this fit-based relationship suffer a significant penalty in terms of their financial performance as measured by return on assets (ROA) and return on sales (ROS). Our findings allow us to shed new light on the linkage between strategy and governance mode and enable us to illustrate that performance differences across multiproduct firms may be better understood by considering the fit between their strategy and their governance mode instead of simply focusing either on their strategy or on their governance mode per se.