Raffaella Sadun is a Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Sadun's research focuses on the economics of productivity, management and organizational change. Her research documents the economic and cultural determinants of managerial choices, as well as their implications for organizational performance in both the private and public sector (including healthcare and education). She is among the founders of the World Management Survey (www.worldmanagementsurvey.org) and the Executive Time Use Study (www.executivetimeuse.org). Professor Sadun's work has appeared in leading peer reviewed journals including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Economic Journal, and has been featured in the business press, including The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. She is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research and Research Associate in the Ariadne Labs Program in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In 2012 Professor Sadun was nominated as a Junior Faculty Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. She was the winner of the McKinsey Award for the best article in the Harvard Business Review in 2018.
Professor Sadun completed her PhD in Economics at the London School of Economics. Prior to her doctoral studies, Professor Sadun earned a M.Sc. in Economics from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
How can we improve care for hospital patients? The key issue we need to figure out, says Professor Raffaella Sadun, is how to bring physicians and administrators together to work as a team and not as antagonists. Sadun studies management practices and how they affect organizational performance.
An Interview with Raffaella Sadun on how two traditionally connected technologies may appear to pull organizations in opposing directions, published on MIT Sloan Management Review (website), (April 5, 2016).
Two new papers investigate the role of basic managerial processes across secondary schools and acute care hospitals in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia.
We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in 8 countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the US obtain the highest management scores closely followed by Germany, then Italy, Brazil and with India on the lowest scores. We also show that autonomous government schools (i.e. government funded but with substantial independence like UK academies and US charters) have significantly higher management scores than regular government schools and private schools. Almost half of the difference between the management scores of autonomous government schools and regular government schools is accounted for by differences in better governance (accountability) and leadership of the principal/head.
We collect data on management practices for operations, targets and human resources in 2,000 hospitals in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Sweden, UK and the US. These management practices are strongly associated with better clinical outcomes, such as heart attack survival rates, and financial outcomes like profits. We show that hospitals with more clinically trained managers, that are larger, that operate in more competitive markets, and that are not government owned appear to have significantly higher management scores. The US and UK have the highest average management scores, which we think may be due to relatively politically independent appointment of hospital leaders and stronger accountability mechanisms.
CEOs are often cited as a key factor in determining the success of a firm. However, direct evidence on the behavior of corporate leaders is scant. To fill this gap, we record in detail the activities undertaken by 354 CEOs of listed Indian manufacturing firms over an exogenously chosen work week. We observe substantial heterogeneity in total hours worked ("labor supply") and the allocation of time across activities ("style"). In particular, CEOs can be divided in two groups. The CEOs in the first group (Style 1) are more likely to plan in advance, interact mostly with employees of the firms who are their direct reports, especially in production, and are more likely to meet with many people, and different functions, at the same time. The second group of CEOs (Style 2) is less likely to plan, more likely to meet with outsiders in one-to-one meetings. CEOs who work longer hours and that fall in the Style 1 category are associated with higher firm-level productivity and profitability. CEO labor supply and style are strongly associated with firm level characteristics. In particular, family CEOs work fewer hours and are less likely to adopt the more productive style. To investigate the source of these differences between family and non-family CEOs, we study the effect of two sources of shocks to the disutility of work: extreme weather and televised cricket matches. Controlling for other factors, family CEOs are more likely to decrease their labor supply in response to these shocks.
Are organizations more likely to succeed if they adopt good management practices? The answer may seem obvious to most HBR readers, but these three economists cast their net much wider than that. In a decade long study of thousands of organizations in 20 countries, they and their interview team assessed how well manufacturers, schools, and hospitals adhere to three management basics: targets, incentives, and monitoring.
Are you among the 79%? In our research into more than 8,000 companies in 20 countries, 79% of organizations reported that their management practices were above average.
Healthcare expenditure represents a major challenge for all countries, absorbing an increasing percentage of national income. Nations are grappling with increases in demand for healthcare as their populations age and expectations rise along with living standards. At the same time, industrialised countries face budgetary shortfalls. As these nations seek to control healthcare costs, an unbalanced focus on “cost” can carry unacceptable consequences; therefore health systems across the developed world are focusing on enhancing quality and productivity. Implementing systemic change is daunting, but the results from this latest Management Matters in Healthcare research provide an optimistic message: improving management practices is a way to raise both quality and productivity. Thus, instilling better management practices could be a key part of addressing difficult challenges.
What determines whether decisions happen on the bottom, middle, or top rung of the corporate ladder? New research offers a surprising conclusion: The answer often lies in the technology that a company uses.
Since Coco Chanel unveiled her iconic black dress in Paris in 1926, that little black dress has become a clothing essential in every woman's wardrobe...In a similar vein I have been working with an international research team for the last decade to discover the essentials of management. This team — from the Harvard Business School, Cambridge University, the London School of Economics, McKinsey & Company, and Stanford University — has surveyed over 10,000 firms in over 20 countries, interviewed hundreds of CEOs, and even run multimillion dollar management field experiments in an unparalleled research effort to reveal some basic practices that every manager should follow.
