In Simple Words
Think of a blind taste test for restaurants where food critics evaluate dishes without knowing which chef cooked them or how expensive the restaurant is, while the chefs do not know they are being judged for a national ranking.
Research question
Measuring intangible management quality across diverse enterprises is prone to interviewer bias, self-reporting inflation, and subjective evaluation errors.
Participants
Cross-country manufacturing firm survey sample including 695 US firms, 620 Indian firms, 1,083 Brazilian and Chinese firms, and 232 Indian textile firms with 100 to 5,000 employees.
Study Design
Double-blind telephone survey scoring 18 operational practices on a 1-to-5 ordinal scale across monitoring, targets, and incentives, where interviewers were blind to firm financial performance and managers were unaware of being scored.
Results
Baseline BVR management practice scores correlated at 0.404 (p = 0.077) with the paper's 38 binary practice index across experimental firms, successfully capturing systematic productivity differences across countries and firms.
Takeaway
Utilize double-blind, scenario-based open question scoring frameworks to evaluate organizational management practices without triggering self-reporting bias.
Source and citation
See source →Read alongside the research
Plain-English glossary
Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.
- Baseline
The starting measurements in a study. Researchers use these to compare what participants were like at the start with what happens later.
ExampleBefore a training programme starts, researchers measure workers’ earnings. That first measurement is the baseline.
GET-IT glossary · Baseline characteristics ↗Read more about baseline →